Silent Hill: Neverending Nights
by Beautiful Bounty
Summary: Silent Hill is the town that never sleeps. Silent Hill is the town that will not relinquish its victims. How can you fight such a town?
1. Wishing on a Dead Star

It had been years since Jennifer had been in Silent Hill. Her mother and father had packed up the family and left when she was seven; right after the police found the bodies of Walter Sullivan's first two victims. Funny enough, the town hadn't changed since the last time she'd seen it. She drove through her old neighborhood; the faux-Victorian fronts seeming to glare down at her in the poor lighting of the few streetlamps. She passed the elementary school, where she wondered if her name was still notched in the top of the wooden lamp post outside—she had gotten in so much trouble for climbing up there and scratching her name in with a spoon from the cafeteria! But it had been well worth it to see the look on Billy's face when she returned to the ground, sore but triumphant. That had happened only a few short months before he died…had she known that, she might not have climbed over his name and carved hers on the top.

Fear suddenly hooked a frozen claw between her shoulder blades; petrified for no conscious reason and disliking the feeling so, Jennifer reached down and turned on the car radio. There was static on the first pre-set; no surprise as it was set to her favorite station in New Orleans, not Silent Hill. She had driven for a week to get to Silent Hill, and as she played with the dial-knob, she wondered what had happened to her parents to make them send her back here after all these years. It had been a clause in their will, that she personally go up and sort the things in their old house—the fact that they still owned a house in Silent Hill confused Jennifer; they had never returned, and she had never heard her parents say they were going to either…so why did they still have a house here?

Station after station greeted her with static; Jennifer frowned, wondering if the thick white fog that was rolling in fast could be the reason she wasn't getting anything. She slowed the car down as her visibility diminished to almost nothing, and turned the radio off. It would be really stupid to keep trying to find a radio station when she couldn't see the road in front of her to drive.

As soon as Jennifer had both hands on the wheel, the radio sputtered to life. "SIN!" it shouted; Jennifer nearly went into the side of the hill as her hands jerked on the steering wheel. She fumbled for the knob, trying to shut off the voice. She pounded the command, but the radio refused to go off. "SINNERS! BLASPHEMERS! WHORES AND HARLOTS OF THE MATERIAL WORLD! THIS IS YOUR DAY OF RECKONING! _AND LO THE LORD SAID UNTO HIM: YOU MUST SACRIFICE YOUR FIRSTBORN, IN ORDER TO ENTER THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN! _HEAVEN, MY CHILDREN, HEAVEN'S DOOR IS JUST WAITING FOR US TO USE THE KEY TO GET IN! BUT WE CANNOT GET IN IF WE ENTRAP OURSELVES WITH THE FITTINGS OF THIS SINNING WORLD! DO YOU HEAR ME JENNIFER?" Jennifer nearly drove into the side of the mountain again at the sound of her voice. Who the hell was this religious nut, and why—out of all the names in the world to choose from—did he choose hers so randomly and with such rage in his voice? "_LET NOT YOUR SOUL BE WEIGHED DOWN BY FALSE DUTIES TO THIS WORLD! THE DEVIL PROMISES YOUR SALVATION BUT ONLY TEARS OF THE HOLY MOTHER CAN MAKE YOU PURE AGAIN!_" The voice on the radio rose to a frightening pitch, cracking every few words. Ears aching from the verbal assault, Jennifer tried one last time to turn the radio off. She raised a fist and punched the entire face of the radio, the on/off and volume knob cutting a jagged trough between her first and second knuckle. As the stinging cut began to bleed, the radio fell silent. A single drop of blood glistened on the knob, seemingly ominous in its complacency.

Eyes still glued to the road and fear digging an even deeper trench between her shoulders, Jennifer sought blindly for a napkin to dab at the cut on her hand. The fog grew thicker, and whiter, until it was almost like snow and her headlights were blinding her more than they were helping her. She dimmed them, and slowed the car down even further. Now she was crawling on the road and praying no hot-shot moron came flying up behind her.

Something thudded against the roof of her car hollowly, as though a handful of acorns had been flung down on it. The sound jarred Jennifer's nerves even more; that's why when a huge bird flew into her window, she lost control of the car. The resounding smack of flesh and feathers on her windshield had caused Jennifer's hands to jerk, drawing the steering wheel to the left. As she fought to pull it back to the right side of the road, it seemed as though something was pulling it away from her hands. Blinded by fog and the bird carcass, Jennifer could only fight helplessly as the car first spun out of control, bouncing off the side of the hill and the guardrail, then slipped through a gap in the guard rail near a raven and slid down, down, down the side of the hill, flipping over near the bottom and continuing to spin even as it sat on its roof.

Jennifer's vision went from red to black to red to normal to plagued by black spots, plagued by tiny pinpoint flashes of light, and back to red. The scenery just beyond her fingertips was a swirling miasma of black and the interior of her car. Bile rose in her throat even as she opened her mouth to scream uselessly in fear. As the car slid to a stop beside the lake, Jennifer blacked out, falling limp and feeling her seatbelt cut into her chest as gravity tried to pull her out of the seat…

A rapid knocking on her window caused Jennifer's eyes to jolt wide open. She looked around uncomprehendingly, still seeing the world upside down through the front window. Then she realized the pressure on her chest wasn't there anymore; the seatbelt wasn't holding her upside down in her rolling tomb. She looked out the window on her side, mind still unwilling to except life over death.

An old man, face withered like an apple that's been left out and anger etched in every wrinkle, glared at her. He held a flashlight in his hand, and shined it right in her eyes. "What are you doing?" he barked through the glass.

Jennifer fumbled for the button console on her door, and managed to get the window rolled down. "I just got into town; must've dozed off." She said, smiling nervously. Beyond the old man she could see a tree-lined street, chalk-scored sidewalks, and rows of houses. But wait; how could she be in her old neighborhood? She had driven through it, hadn't she? Hadn't she been driving in the hills…_leaving_ Silent Hill?

No; it must've been a dream. A terrible dream brought on by road fatigue. That had to be it. That had to be why her mind was so fuzzy and uncooperative, why the dream had made no sense and why she was so disoriented. Right?

"Who are you; why are you here?" the old man demanded.

"My name's Jennifer Daelí. This is my parents' house. They sent me here to go through it and get it ready to sell." She said stiffly, as automatically as any machine recording.

The old man's glare wasn't letting up. "The Daelís haven't been here in years. What makes you think I'm going to buy that crap?"

Jennifer sighed. "Will a driver's license help?" she asked wearily.

"Don't be a smart-ass." The old man growled.

Jennifer shook her head, and turned away from the window. She reached over the center console, to look in the passenger-side floor board for her purse. She got a hold of it, and spent another few moments digging around it for her wallet. Unearthing the tattered brown wallet, she opened it up to reveal her driver's license as she turned back to the window. "See? Proof-positive as to what I…was…saying…" she frowned. There was no one outside her car. "What the hell is wrong with me?" she muttered, throwing the wallet onto the passenger seat without thinking, and opening the door to get out of the car.

Stepping out of the car, she noticed there was no one at all in the neighborhood. All the houses were dark and not a sound could be heard anywhere. Such dead and stifling silence Jennifer had never experienced before. She took the keys out of her car, and left her wallet and purse inside. She hesitantly walked up the few steps of walkway from the driveway to the steps of the tiny front porch. The wooden steps shrieked with indignation as she went up; the sounds cutting through the still air like a hot knife. Wincing as the front porch squeaked under her, Jennifer took the old house keys out of her pocket, looking at them. There was the house key, the garage key, and a key chain from the amusement park. Robbie the Rabbit was dingy now, and missing an ear; Jennifer wondered if the amusement park was still on the lake…if it was, maybe she'd go visit it before she left.

Forcing the key into the door, because it seemed as though the keyhole had rusted over the years, Jennifer struggled to get the front door open. Once unlocked, the door swung inwards wildly, and a blast of cold, musty air assaulted Jennifer. She winced, taking a step back. The step put her foot on the edge of the stair, and she toppled backwards, rolling down the steps and cracking her head against the sidewalk. Dizziness sent the world around her spinning, and Jennifer once again blacked out…

She came to with the smell of pine and gasoline in her nose. Panic put her lungs in a vise, and for a second her skin burned as though it was on fire. Jennifer forced herself to calm down and look around; the forest was upside down and everything in her car was a mess. Even as she used a pen knife to cut the straps of the seatbelt, she wasn't sure what was going on was real. Had she truly lost control of her car in the hills, and flipped into a ravine? Or was she asleep in the driveway of her childhood home?

Cold and lost, Jennifer managed to open the passenger's side door, the driver's side being too mangled to force away. She crawled out of the car, reaching back only to take a handful of maps and a tape recorder; the tape recorder was an expensive gadget she wasn't keen on relinquishing to the unknown, and the maps? Well Jennifer had no idea where the hell she was or where the hell she should be going; maps seemed like a very good idea.

The car burst into flames when Jennifer was only a few feet away. At the explosion, Jennifer ran full speed into the woods, though she was still peppered with debris and flaming pieces of her life as they tried to fence her in. When she was at last a safe distance away from the wreck, Jennifer realized she was on a path in the middle of nowhere, and she had no idea where it was going to end. "Man…this is bad…" she muttered, looking around anxiously. The only thing she could really be glad for was that she had worn jeans and comfortable sneakers for the final leg of her trip, instead of trying to make an impression when she got into town.

The woods were too dense to be penetrated by the fog completely, but the ground was still well-blanketed and Jennifer kept tripping over unseen tree roots. The path she cautiously tread wound through the woods, past trees that seemed to have faces and shapeless rocks that none the less felt ominous; past rusted pieces of fence and old signs that were painted over with strange symbols.

The first time she encountered one of those strange, strange signs, Jennifer knelt and studied it. The circle was sloppily done, paint still dripping from its uneven edges. 'Still fresh?' Jennifer thought. "Weird." She said out loud. Inside the circle was a triangle, a lidless eye in its center. Around the edge of the circle were strange marks she could not read. But somehow, the symbol looked familiar… "I think I've seen this somewhere before…but where?" she thought hard on it, but the memory just wouldn't come. "I know I've seen this somewhere before." She muttered, frowning. All at once, the memory had taken hold of her mind; though it wasn't all there…she couldn't see it all.

**The symbol/the mark of the beast/in mother's blood/fire in the night/**

The whispered words that wove through the shards of fragmented memory made Jennifer's head ache. Her vision was awash with red, and a momentary darkness curtained her eyes. When she opened them again, she was standing before the gates of something called 'Wish House'. "Wish House?" Jennifer searched her memory, but there was nothing there to grasp. Hesitantly, she pushed open the metal doors and stepped in…

The yard was fenced in by huge wooden planks; the planks were decorated with childish chalk drawings. Jennifer investigated a view, curious at the lack of joy in the doodles on the fence. Children were usually carefree and light-hearted; their inability to stay inside the lines of a picture was proof of that. But these drawings, depicting people being eaten by horned monsters and all other matter of dead things made her feel ill. Jennifer looked to the wooden house in the center of the yard. It looked harmless enough; two stories and not very wide in front or side. She started towards the house, passing a tree stump with an axe in it. Suddenly, a voice trapped in electric static assaulted her ears.

"_Oh help Little Red Riding Whore cried as the valiant wolf sought to swallow her whole. "Who will help?" She asked most piteously as the brave wolf ate her with gusto. Just then, a woodsman and his great axe happened upon the Seen of Trials and he slew the great wolf and pulled the whore from her flesh tomb; and she, having been tried by fire and ice, became the Holy Mother…"_

Jennifer whirled around, looking for speakers for where the voice had come from. She could see nothing; then it struck her…the tape recorder in her pocket! She picked it up, noting that the play button was depressed. Impossible though; she had no batteries in the thing and the tape inside should have been blank. Common sense told her to throw the tape recorder as far away from her as she could; instead Jennifer slid it back into her back pocket and approached the axe in the tree stump. Around the axe was the symbol that Jennifer had seen over and over again in the woods. Wincing as her head began to throb again in the presence of the symbol; Jennifer grasped the axe in both hands and pulled hard. Three tries later, she had the axe. The cut she had pulled it from began to bleed red, sticky sap. It pulsed up from the stump and Jennifer danced back to avoid getting it on her shoes. Off in the distance she heard a wolf howl.

Unnerved and eager to be away from the outdoors, Jennifer bounded up the steps of the house, and tried the front door. It was locked! Taped to the door was a message:

**No more wishes can be granted at this House. God has seen fit for that. Take the children; they will spread our God's message to the world. **

**Sister**

Jennifer ripped the note off the door, and hefted the axe. She didn't have time to waste looking for keys to a building that had been abandoned. It took a few tries, but she managed to knock the door knob off the door and kick her way inside…

The smell of bacon and burnt hair assaulted her nose. Jennifer coughed, and her vision blurred as her eyes watered. Once the old, foul air had escaped the house through the open door, Jennifer was confronted by a very odd sight. A young tow-headed boy in a striped shirt and jeans was drawing on the walls. He was oblivious to Jennifer's presence; hadn't even seemed to have heard the axe going through the door. Jennifer frowned, and put the axe down, though she did not let go of it. "Hey?" she called softly.

The boy jumped, and whirled around. His bony frame visibly shaken, he pressed himself against the wall. "P-p-please don't tell Sister." He pleaded, lower lip trembling. "I won't draw on the walls again; but please don't tell Sister!"

Jennifer held her hands up and shook her head. "I won't tell anyone; I used to draw on the walls all the time too." She said with a smile.

The boy still seemed anxious. "Cross your heart?" he demanded.

"And hope to die, if I should have told a lie." Jennifer assured him. She crossed the room to him, and squatted down to be eye-level with the kid. He still seemed skittish, but he made no moves to run away. "What's your name?" she asked.

"William, but everybody calls me Billy." The kid replied.

Jennifer frowned, staring at the kid and trying to recover the memory of Billy from the back of her mind. Had he always been so disheveled, so frighteningly wide-eyed? Then she shook her head. What was she thinking? Billy was dead—murdered. There was no possible way he could be standing in front of her right that second. She was just crazy. "Well Billy, my name's Jennifer. Can I ask what are you doing here all by yourself? It's dangerous." She said.

Billy rolled his eyes. "You don't have to tell me that." He replied with the air of wounded pride only a child can master, the one that sounds like disbelief and indignation all at once. "But I can't go anywhere else. Sister said if we left the House without a grown-up, the monsters outside would eat us."

"There are no monsters outside Billy." Jennifer said firmly. She was angry; what the hell kind of sick bastard told a kid a story like that, just to make him stay inside? "But nevertheless, why don't you stick with me, okay? The woods are dark and you could get lost." She smiled.

Billy looked over her shoulder, seemingly in thought. "Are you a monster?" he asked.

"Nope."

"Prove it." At this Billy folded his arms across his chest.

Jennifer smiled wide. "See? No monster fangs." She held up her fingers. "No monster claws." She giggled—if her chewed-down nails were a threat to anything, it was to her digestive tract. "And could a monster put his life on the line by promising?" She asked.

Billy seemed to think about it some more. "Okay." He said finally. "You're obviously not a monster, but I have to be careful. Sister said—"

Jennifer cut him off. "Sister didn't tell you all the truth." She said gently, not willing to come out and call someone Billy held in high regards a liar.

"Don't you talk about Sister!" Billy said savagely.

Jennifer was taken aback. "I'm sorry Billy; why don't you show me around this house, okay?" she said gently, hurriedly trying to smooth over her faux-pas. Billy looked like a runner, and she didn't want this poor little kid lost in the woods on her conscience.

"You don't know it?" Billy looked at her, visibly puzzled. "I thought everyone here knew the Wish House."

"I moved away from Silent Hill a long, long time ago. I was little and didn't know a whole lot."

"Oh." Billy seemed to accept this reasoning. He stuck a hand out. "I'll show you everything, even the rooms I'm not supposed to go in by myself. I can though, because you're a grown-up and you'll be with me."

Jennifer stood, and took his hand. It was warm and sticky, like a child's hand usually was. "That's right."

"Stay close though; I think some of the monsters got in the house while Sister was gone." Billy said, cute in his childish seriousness.

"It'll be okay." Jennifer assured him. She hefted the axe to her shoulder. "See? We're prepared."

Billy nodded. He pulled her to the center of the room. "This is the living room. Sometimes we take our lessons here, when we're not at the other school."

Jennifer looked around. The room was in shambles, she noticed for the first time. The kick mold was crumbling away from the walls, and it seemed as though Billy had been hard at work. There were crayon doodles all over the room. "You've been busy." She remarked. "Would you like to tell me what they are? I can't see very well in this light." Jennifer added, in case it hurt his feelings that what was painfully obvious to him was not so to her.

Billy nodded, and pulled her to the far corner of the living room. He stepped over a fallen armoire, letting go of her hand to explain the drawing. "This is Alessa. She had a bad accident because God was punishing her mother. Then she ascended to Heaven." He said solemnly.

The drawing sent chills down Jennifer's spine. Billy had drawn a girl with short dark hair, and surrounded her with flames. She couldn't see the print in the word bubble coming out of the drawn girl's mouth; it had been crossed out with thick black crayon. In the next drawing, it was the same girl, though a thick black line cut her face in half.

"When she ascended," Billy said, "God put her soul in two places so she could get strong enough to help with the Resurrection. Her mommy was supposed to protect her and keep her safe, but she failed because she was a bad mommy." A note of savagery crept into Billy's voice. "And I know bad mommies." He added softly, as though he thought Jennifer wouldn't hear him.

"What's this scribble over here?" Jennifer asked shakily.

If Billy noticed the quiver in her voice, he didn't seem to care. "That's Alessa's mommy being condemned to Hell because she failed to serve God."

"And the man?" Jennifer asked, assuming the small stick figure near the scribble that was Alessa's mother was a man.

"That's Harry. He tried to stop the Resurrection, and that's why Alessa's mommy burned up in Hell. But God gave the world another try, and it was Harry's job to take care of her."

That explained the small circle in the stick figure's arms. "That's a big story for a little guy like you to draw out."

"It took me a while." Billy replied with a nod. He came back over the armoire and took her hand, leading her to the next set of pictures.

Jennifer looked; the girl in this one had yellow hair, though the crown was black. She smiled; Billy had a knack for interesting detail, even if his subject matter was deranged and terrifying; though she would not admit that to herself just yet.

"This was the new Holy Mother. The first one was Alessa, and then it was Cheryl, and this one is Heather. She thought Harry was her real dad until she found out the truth. Then one of the Sisters who had been forsaken by Wish House had him killed. That made Heather mad and she banished the bad Sister to Hell." Billy said matter-of-factly.

The drawing of 'Heather' was followed by a second, more detailed drawing of Harry, with his entire midsection scribbled out in red. A fanged woman—who must be the 'Bad Sister' was surrounded by red flames. "And what happened to Heather?" Jennifer asked softly.

"She didn't bear God either. Is it really hard for women to have babies, because we've had three ladies try and it hasn't worked." Billy asked.

Jennifer coughed and shifted on her feet uncomfortably. "Well…yes Billy. It is kinda hard for ladies to have babies. That's why there's so much fuss made when she's trying."

Billy seemed to accept this answer. "That was the last time God tried to get a lady to have Him." He pulled her over to the next set of drawings. There was a wild-eyed figure with blood on his face and body. "This is the Sacrament man. He tried to resurrect the Holy Mother with the 21 Sacraments." Billy's hand in hers grew sweaty. "He did a lot of bad things to do it." He added softly. "I think it was because he tried to keep track of the Sacraments using the skin of the people who helped."

Jennifer's legs tried to give out. If she remembered right, Billy was talking about Walter Sullivan…the man who killed and then carved numbers into his victims' back. That much she knew; learned from spying on her parents' hushed conversations. But what the hell were the 21 Sacraments and what did that have to do with anything? "And what happened next?" Jennifer asked thickly, throat closing up with fear.

"This is Henry." Billy said, pointing to another stick figure. "God sent him because Walter had done bad things to fulfill the 21 Sacraments. He stopped Walter and Walter got to go to Heaven because he had believed, even though he did bad things to try and help."

Jennifer's nausea was almost completely out of her control now. "Is that so?" she asked faintly. "So that didn't work either?" She couldn't really follow the story Billy was telling; it folded over itself and got so convoluted with his childish sense of language, Jennifer counted on herself to remain absolutely clueless. Judging from Billy's story, and the drawings though, cluelessness didn't seem like such a bad thing.

Billy shook his head. "Nope; the Holy Birth is really hard."

"Oh…what else is there Billy?" Jennifer asked.

"You don't want to see anymore of my drawings?" Billy asked, sounding hurt.

"Oh no, it's not that. They're very good and I've learned a lot; but I know there are other things in this house you want to show me." She smiled thinly.

"Oh, right!" Billy smiled. He pulled her past an overturned table, skidding on papers scattered on the floor, until he brought her to the second door in the room. "This is the Prayer Room. A non-believer came in here once and he got punished. 171211."

Jennifer frowned; why had Billy recited numbers after that. "Can I go in?" she asked.

"I don't think so. The door's locked and it would be bad to break it without a good reason."

"What's a good reason?" Jennifer asked.

"Um…I dunno."

"Is fire a good reason?"

"Why do you say that?" Billy asked, taking a step away, voice shaking.

"Because I can smell smoke, but I don't know where it's coming from." Jennifer said, speaking softly to calm him. "Can you smell it too?"

Billy sniffed. "Is that what that smell is?" he asked.

She nodded. "I think it might be." Jennifer lifted the axe.

Suddenly Billy screamed. "DON'T!"

Jennifer's arms faltered and she found herself being ushered across the room by Billy. "Billy, what's wrong?"

"She's coming, she's coming, I'm in so much trouble! Don't let her catch you, don't! She'll be mad, she'll be mad, she's already so mad!" Billy was babbling.

"Billy please! Billy, calm down!" Jennifer tried.

Billy opened the door next to the stairs, and pushed her in. "Stay in here, don't let her see you. There's a secret behind the wall if you need it, but please don't let her see you! You'll get in trouble too!" Tears were streaming down his face.

"Billy!" Jennifer shouted as Billy slammed the door. She pushed against it, but found she couldn't budge it. Billy had locked her in. "Billy! Open the door Billy! I want to help you!" she shouted, pounding on the door.

"Be quiet!" Billy pleaded.

There was a dot of light shining on the back of the closet (because that's what Billy had just locked her in), and Jennifer followed its source to a hole just above the doorknob. She knelt down and peered out.

Billy was sitting on the floor before the entry door, stock still. The door was ruined from Jennifer's homemade locksmith technique, and it was brought off the hinges by a huge burly man in a blonde wig. For some strange reason, Jennifer's ears weren't working. She could see the wig-man's lips moving, but she couldn't hear a noise! Billy kept looking back at the closet frequently; Jennifer wondered if the wig-man had asked him why. Then it didn't matter, because the wig-man was coming towards the closet door. As he got closer, the strong scent of blood invaded the closet. Jennifer skittered back away from the peephole, elbow knocking against the back wall of the closet. "A secret behind the wall?" she whispered as the doorknob jiggled. Then she saw an indent, where her elbow had hit the wall. "Here's hoping…" she muttered as she pushed against the back wall with all of her strength.

The plywood covering a huge hole gave out, and Jennifer was sliding down a long series of concrete stairs on the plywood; when the stairs gave out, Jennifer rolled off the plywood. It continued to skate down the floor. "Where am I?" she whispered.

Above, there was an earth-shattering wall-shaking roar. 'Never mind!' Jennifer thought as she opened the first door on her right and ran in. She shut the door softly but firmly, and leaned against it with all her weight. Footsteps thundered by, and she heard the wail of a child (Billy?). Jennifer didn't dare open the door and go out though; the wig-man could be somewhere close by, and the last thing in the world she wanted to do was go up against him with just an axe. Instead she opted to look around the room.

It was like a cell, 8X10 with blood-smeared walls. The smell was worse than any meat-packing industry. Jennifer almost threw up right then and there; only fear that the wig-man would hear her wretch kept down the Skittles™ she had eaten earlier. In the center of the room was a diary, dog-eared with a broken spine. Jennifer approached it cautiously, constantly looking left to right as though the wig-man would walk through the walls and kill her any minute.

The diary was written with red ink; suspiciously red ink. Jennifer didn't REALLY want to think about it that hard.

_Dear Diary;_

_Sister has put me in the sinner's room again, because I stumbled on the morning's prayer walk. I feel the sin of hate growing in my heart and it frightens me. Why must Sister be so unusually cruel? I know that to spare the rod is to spoil the child, but it is as though we shall grow up so pious as to actually be sinful. I read in a science book that this is called the paradoxical effect. I think perhaps that is another reason why Sister is so angry with me; she says science is the Devil's work and that my reading it will bring ruin to the House. I'm afraid of everything. Sin of fear. 011211_

The number pattern that followed the entry made Jennifer's knees shake. The sound of the door behind her made her jump. The wig-man stormed in.

"Spiteful girl!" he screamed in falsetto. "You will be punished!"

Jennifer's knees gave out, and so did her consciousness…


	2. Home is Where the Coffin Is

Jennifer's eyes fluttered open, and she saw an old garage door just beyond her windshield. "What the hell?" she muttered, rubbing her eyes. "Where's the Wish House? And Billy? Who was that crazy-ass cross-dresser? What's wrong with me? Why do I keep dreaming such weird dreams?" She looked around her car. Everything seemed to be in order. The tape recorder was on the seat next to her, her wallet was in her purse; there were no leaves on the floor mat so she hadn't been outside. But what was that glistening on the radio dial knob? Blood? Jennifer looked down at her hands. Between the first and second knuckle on her right hand was a tiny cut, still stinging. "Jesus!" Jennifer yelped, throwing her car door open wide and scrambling out as fast as she could. When her feet hit the concrete, the jolt was enough to make her slow down. 'This is silly' she told herself. 'Obviously I cut my hand while I was driving and I'm so tired my dreams are getting weird. That's it; everything can make sense now' Jennifer climbed the stairs to the front door, talking to herself along the way. She had been so deep in thought; she hadn't noticed that the front door was wide open, or that the keys were still in the lock.

She had one foot in the house before she realized what was wrong. Yanking her foot back as if from fire, Jennifer backed down the steps and turned and ran to her car. She opened the door and threw herself in headfirst, looking for her cell-phone so she could call 9-1-1. There was a squeak from somewhere near by, like a gate in need of oil. She ignored it as her fingers brushed the cell phone case. She sat back on her haunches, cell phone in hand. Surprisingly enough, even in this fog she had a service signal. She dialed 9-1-1 and waited. And waited. And waited. "What the hell? Jennifer pulled the ringing phone away from her ears and stared at it. "Don't these people know what emergency stands for?"

There was another squeak, louder this time. Jennifer looked up to see a strangely familiar little boy on a rusty red tricycle at the end of the driveway. She frowned. "Billy?"

The kid shook his head. "The phones don't work here Jennifer. Nothing works here except what you bring with you." He started to peddle away.

Frustrated, Jennifer shoved the cell phone into her back pocket, and got to her feet. "Hey; wait! What do you mean by that?"

Billy continued peddling away. "Look in the trunk of your car. That's all I can tell you!" he called back, stopping for a minute. Then he looked back at her. "I have to draw you on the walls when this is all over Jennifer; please live so I don't have to use the black crayon!" He said before peddling off slowly into the mist.

Jennifer ran after him. "Billy, wait! Billy, it's dangerous to run off in this…fog…" A strange sight greeted her at the end of the block. The street seemed to have broken apart from itself. Just before the point of absolutely no vision, she could see the rest of Deacon Street. Between her half and the other part of Deacon was a seemingly bottomless chasm. Jennifer wasn't eager to find out if that part (the bottomless part) was true; so she returned to her car, fretful and confused. "The trunk…" she mused, opening it though figure there would be nothing she didn't already know about in it.

The joke was on her. Instead of her suitcase and her emergency roadside kit, there was an ax and backpack. The backpack was old and dirty, but the cartoon characters were still legible. "What the…? My old backpack?" Jennifer opened it. Inside was a box of crayons and two letters. The first one was from her parents, and it was written to her…and dated the day before today!

_Dear Jen;_

_Your father and I love you so much, and we're so sorry for the things we did wrong while you were growing up…like staying in Silent Hill for so long. I love you Jen, but I have something to tell you that will seem strange; but don't forget that I love you with all my heart._

_You see Jen; you're not actually our daughter. I found you near the outskirts of town, along with a man named Harry. Harry had a baby too; her name was Cheryl…then the town got her and gave him a baby girl named Heather. Heather was in his arms after it was all over; I found you alone on a grave…you were crying and you were so tiny. I was afraid you were going to die on me. So I took you, and Harry and I went our separate ways. Then I met your father, and we got married not too long after that. But we were stupid and stayed in that dreadful town…your father was so loyal to it. _

_When Walter killed your friend Billy, I knew it was the only way to convince your father to leave Silent Hill. I thought we had gotten out in time, but if you're reading this letter, then you're in the Silent Hill that Harry and I were once in together. I'm so sorry Jennifer, I'm so very sorry. I told your father we shouldn't have kept the house, but he had hoped we would come back to Silent Hill…I wouldn't let that happen. But now I've sent you into Hell and I don't know how to get you back out. Please Jen, forgive me…_

_Love,_

_Mom_

_PS: I know this doesn't make sense baby-girl…but time in Silent Hill isn't normal. It's warped, like a record left out to bake in the sun. Remember this to be true…_

Jennifer's hands shook. "Adopted? There is no way in hell that I'm adopted." She ran a hand through her long black hair, the same color hair her father had had. "I am not adopted. This is just my brain playing horrible tricks on me and when I wake up I'm going to stab it with a Q-tip." She wanted to throw the letter away; ball it up and heave it as far as she could. It couldn't be true! It couldn't! But there, in the lower right-hand corner; a daisy doodle, her mother's signature. Jennifer stared at the flower. It had been her mother's way of letting her know she had actually written the letter…when she'd done that in life, Jennifer had thought she was paranoid and maybe a little crazy…but now…in this horrible town…her mother's paranoia and fears made sense. This meant that Jennifer was losing her mind too. She shoved the letter back inside the backpack and took a look at the second one. It was done in crayon.

_Deer Jen._

_I yam sore u have 2 b her. I hop u will bee o k. Donut die be claws I wood b sad._

_Billy_

On the bottom of Billy's note was a map labeled '87'. After reading it out loud a couple of times, Jennifer finally got the message. "I am sorry you have to be here, I hope you will be okay; don't die because I would be sad." At this she raised an eyebrow. "Well Billy, I yam NOT going to die." She said. "Because 1) this is a dream and 2) I am NOT getting my ass kicked by a dream." The note and map she tucked into her pocket without thinking. Then she picked up the backpack, pulled the straps out as far as they would go, and slung it on her back. She picked up the ax too; if what Billy had said was true, the backpack was her only means to carry more than three things all at once, and the ax…well…who in their right mind would mess with a girl wearing a Pokémon backpack and carrying an ax? Seriously now.

Carrying the ax in both hands, Jennifer once again went up the porch steps and stepped into the house cautiously. She looked left and right, even knocking over the coat rack next to the door to see if she could scare anyone out.

The only thing she scared was a cloud of dust and herself. It looked like the house was empty. She tried to search methodically, but after breaking down the pantry door, the closet door, and the laundry room door and finding them all bare, she was bored. "Hell, I'll just stick to rooms that have potential." She declared as she stood in the living room, taking a break. Then it struck her; it was night outside, pitch black…but all the lights were on in her house. Looking out the living room window, she could see all the lights in the other houses were on as well, as were the street lamps. "Weird…" she shook her head and went into the kitchen.

Unlike the rest of the house, it was dust-free and gleaming like new. "Equally weird." Jennifer said as she opened the fridge door. There was a can of soda and a stick of butter inside. She took the soda and felt better after drinking it. She left the stick of butter where it was. "I'm not that hungry yet."

Jennifer decided it was time to go upstairs, though she was frightened to do so. With each step up she took, her heart beat faster until she felt like she was going to stroke out. The first door she opened was to the bathroom; the only reason she opened the bathroom door was because she hadn't remembered it was the bathroom—the layout of her old house was pretty much gone from her memory after eleven years of not living there.

The air was rank with the scent of rotting meat and copper; unable to control herself, Jennifer found herself over the bowl, trying not to splash her shoes with half-digested Skittles™ or the black sludge that was in the bowl. Once she got control of her stomach and her senses, and popped half the pack of Dentyne™ in her mouth after nearly ripping her pocket off to get it, Jennifer managed to calm down enough to take stock of the room.

The mirror was still on the wall, though how was beyond her. A huge hole took up most of the wall; it was surrounded by the same strange runes that she had seen on the signs outside Wish House. The shower was rusty, though the head was still dripping blood. Blood was pooled in the bathtub itself and sprayed all on the walls. "Jesus…what died in here?" Jennifer asked, staring at the bloody scene of the shower.

(Looking back, she realized that saying that was the equivalent of running through the woods in high heels while Michael Myers came after her with track shoes on.)

Jennifer hadn't paid any attention to her reflection in the mirror; nothing wrong had registered. She had her back to it when it started to change. The mirror-Jen turned around to glare hatefully at the back of real Jen's head. Then its skin rotted away, coming off in layers until the muscle and bone underneath showed. One eye rolled out of its socket and lay on the cheek, swinging by one greasy black threat. The other rolled back until all that could be seen was white. One putrefied slimy arm came through the mirror and tried to yank the backpack off Jennifer's back. That got her attention; Jennifer screamed and snatched herself away from the mirror, nearly falling into the bloody bathtub. She bounded off the wall and fell out the door, landing on her stomach. She scooted away from the bathroom and to a sitting position on the opposite wall.

Mirror Jen seemed to be stuck in the mirror from the waist down. From the waist out she was all claws and fangs. Then her arms grew longer and her rotting fingers were headed straight for Jennifer's throat! Jennifer kicked at them, skirting around until she could just get her hands on the handle of the ax (she had propped it by the bathroom door before having her little episode). With the ax in hand, she began attacking the mirror monster, beating its arms back and finally laying the ax right in the middle of the thing's forehead. It slide back into the mirror with a roar of protest; not willing to take any chances, Jennifer smashed the mirror with the butt of the ax; then stomped on the pieces as they lay on the ground.

"What the hell was that thing?" she half shrieked, wondering if breaking mirrors was going to have to become a survival policy. Unnerved, Jennifer ended her search of the upstairs and started down the stairs. Halfway down, she saw Billy at the door.

"Billy!" she shouted. "Are you okay!" she started skipping steps.

"Don't come down." Billy called.

Jennifer froze in mid-step. "Why?"

"Because you have to go upstairs and find the truth. Did you take the grease from the kitchen?" he asked.

"Grease? What grease? Billy, what are you talking about?" Jennifer took another step down; she was almost to the bottom.

"DON'T!" He bellowed, voice shrill with panic. "Sister knows where you are! If you come down stairs she'll find you! You'll be in trouble!'

"Okay Billy; okay." Jennifer said softly, trying to calm him down. "Now what grease are you talking about Billy?"

"Did you get my note?" he asked.

Jennifer nodded. "Yes Billy; it was a very nice note." She smiled. 'Especially with the part where you didn't want me to die' she added to herself. "Now the grease Billy; what are you talking about?"

"The butter in the fridge. The door to the truth is rusted shut. You have to open it though." His wide blue eyes were full of tears.

"Well Billy, I can't get the grease if you won't let me down the stairs sweetie." She said soothingly.

"But I can't come in your house." He said.

"Yes you can; I say you can come in my house." Jennifer replied, at once figuring out the trick.

Billy nodded; still on the rusty red tricycle, he peddled into the kitchen. Jennifer could hear the fridge door open and shut. Then Billy peddled back into sight. "Here Jennifer." He said, riding up to the stairs and holding out the butter.

Jennifer took it. "Thank you Billy. Do you want me to grease your wheels Billy? They're awfully loud."

Billy thought about it. "But if our feet touch the floor, Sister will find us. She can…she knows when we're walking where we're not supposed to if we're on the ground."

"How Billy? How does Sister know that?" Jennifer asked, putting the butter down on a step and hold her hands out to him. "Why don't you come on the steps with me and tell me about Sister?"

"I can't." Billy said.

"Why not?"

"Because she's coming." He whispered.

Outside there came a HUGE roar, followed by a cry of pain.

"She punished someone for being bad." Billy whispered, looking over his shoulder. "I know that sound because I get in trouble a lot." He added solemnly, looking back at her.

"Billy, I want you to come with me." Jennifer said firmly.

"I can't." he said, rolling away from her. He peddled towards the front door.

"Billy, wait!" Jennifer started to go after him, but found her foot wouldn't go past the last step. She couldn't get down! Something was holding her back!

"I can't let you get you trouble." Billy said. He smiled; a sad little smile too old for his face. "Now go upstairs and find the Truth. It's very important that you do."

Confused even more so than before, Jennifer tried in vain to chase after Billy. But no matter what she did, she could not get past the last step. As she tried, a thick red mist swept through the open door, blanketing the floor. It crept up the stairs slowly, cold as ice. Jennifer grabbed the butter and ran upstairs, well ahead of the fog.

She looked around, trying to see which door was rusted; that was the one Billy had said to open. The rest of the doors on the hall were locked, and Jennifer was tempted to knock them open with the ax…but after the bathroom incident, she was slightly more cautious. The only door she could see that might resemble what Billy was talking about was the door to the attic; its hinges were coated with thick dust and the door knob was gone. It gave a little when Jennifer pushed on it, but not enough for her to get more than a hand through. "I wonder what's so special in here that he doesn't want me to just knock it down…" Jennifer mused, looking at the stick of butter in her hand. It was starting to melt. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see the red fog just coming over the top of the stairs. The sight of it sent Jennifer into action. She greased the hinges with almost the entire stick of butter, and jammed the rest of it in the hole where the door knob used to be. Leaning all her weight into it, she fell into the access stairway that led to the attic. She ran up, and upon finding the attic door wide open, threw herself inside. The door slammed shut behind her, hissing as it sealed itself. "At least the killer fog can't get me." Jennifer sighed, feeling like a dork for being afraid of red fog. However, she didn't feel too bad; if her reflection could decompose and come through the mirror to try and kill her, the red fog could probably kill her too if it wanted.

There was nothing in the attic. Absolutely nothing at all; not even a speck of dust in any of the corners. Jennifer was at a loss; what the hell had Billy sent her up here for? What was there to be had in this empty, empty room; poor lit by a single bulb in the middle. She went to the window and stared out at the street, at the night that stretched on forever. Deacon Street was quiet as a mortuary, and more frightening than a dark alley in the city. She wondered what would happen if she went to the other houses. Would there be nothing but a string of empty rooms, or rooms full of murderous reflections?

The light in the room began to swing around; Jennifer noticed as her shadow began to dance around her. She turned, curious as to what had sent it stirring.

Behind her, her shadow stretched long across the floor. The floor it lay on became uneven, and buckled as the shadow pulled itself up, up, up to Jennifer's height. Being a shadow, it cast no shadow itself. It was silent, faceless and unyielding.

Having investigated the light bulb, Jennifer turned back towards the window. There was nothing behind her; the dancing hairs on the back of her neck had to be a delayed reaction to the thing in the mirror. Something struck the back of her legs and she shrieked. Brandishing the ax, she whirled around and nearly demolished a chair. "Stupid chair." She gave it a kick, but it didn't fall over. "Wait…this wasn't here before." Jennifer said slowly, feeling stupid as the realization dawned on her. She looked at the legs; they were bolted down. "Freaky." She declared as the light over head flickered and dimmed, like the lights in a movie theater. Then it went off completely, though the room was still lit dully. The wall across from the bolted down chair flickered, and the flap-flap-flap of a movie reel being inserted and started could be heard. Where the projector and the film were, Jennifer couldn't even begin to imagine. With no reason other than because she could, Jennifer sat down in the bolted chair and opted to watch the movie.

_Jennifer, driving down the road, surrounded by fog and trees._

"What the hell? That's me!" Jennifer half-shouted in surprise.

_A noise; little claws on the hood of the car. The car veers, and resumes a normal trek. Then a winged monster, nothing but teeth and claws and beady little eyes like a doll flies into the windshield._

"So that's what that was…what an ugly thing."

_The car goes off the road, sliding and bouncing down the hill side, flipping twisting…at last to an end, where a dark-haired girl stumbles out of the car, hysterical and alive._

"Jeez, I didn't know I looked that bad after the wreck." Jennifer wrinkled her nose. Her hair had come undone from its ponytail and twisted around her shoulders like clawed hands. There was dirt all over her face and the lower half of her t-shirt was ripped where she had cut into it trying to cut off the lap belt. The white shirt glowed like phosphorous in the nighttime woods.

_To the Wish House then, the dark-haired girl goes. Her green eyes wide with caution, growing wider as the camera zooms in to her face. All-American girl features taut with fear, the girl takes an ax from a stump and the stump bleeds. The blood forms a shape on the ground and disappears. The girl breaks into the Wish House and finds a boy…_

"Billy…"

_And the boy tells her stories, such terrible stories that the girl feels ill and suddenly the boy pushes her into a closet and shoves a chair under the door handle. Enter the burly man in the wig, face beet red though no sounds issue from his throat. Then the man strikes the boy and he disappears like a mirage in the desert, simply dissolving away into nothing. And then the man goes to the closet and all that can be seen past him is a pair of denim-clad legs flying away and down, down, down into darkness. _

"How am I seeing this?" Jennifer frowned.

_The girl goes into the first room she can, and the man in the wig comes barreling down the stairs, narrowly missing her entrance into the room and he continues past the door, bloodied hands leaving streaks along the wall beside him as he drags his hand along it, seemingly to search for the bad girl. _

_And the girl is in the cell, but it's not the girl of today, not the hero, but her mother; blonde and dressed to enforce in her uniform!_

"Mom!" Jennifer shouted, coming out of the seat and reaching blindly for the movie. She sank to her knees, tears in her eyes.

_The cop is angry, so very angry! There is no door to this cell in Hell and she can see no way to get out. Suddenly above her there is a light and she climbs the walls with a tenacity never shown at a younger age and suddenly she is in a giant room, black walls that stretch forever and bloody rusty chain link floors and she is hurt and limping towards a man holding a bottle of something red, something glowing red and she is begging him to hurry and the man throws the bottle at the beast and the beast is turned into a girl and the girl hands him another girl before she dies and the man and woman run from the black room of blood and rust and they are outside in the snow and fog, the man with a baby in his arms and the woman over his shoulder. Then she leaves him, seeming to hear something in the distance and there is a second baby, squalling and small and all alone and the woman feels such pity that tears fall from her face and she runs to the baby and takes it in her arms and that scene ends but the move is not over._

_The red bottle the man held, its life-saving redness "**Aglophotis**" the screen reads before going black and the light comes back on._

"What the hell is aglophotis?" Jennifer demanded. There was a noise from behind her, and Jennifer realized she wasn't alone. She was surrounded by a sea of writhing black, shadows of all shapes and sizes, but they were very real and very dangerous. She beat back black liquid hands and stood on the chair, unable to go any further. The shadows were washing over her and pulling her down. She felt like she was drowning! Flailing her hands wildly over her head, she grabbed for the light bulb over head, the only thing she could try to hold onto as the shadows tried to drown her. Her hands came together around the bulb itself, bathing the room in complete darkness. It burned her hands, and she let go; the shadows pulled her down and smothered her and Jennifer couldn't see or think anymore…


	3. The Saintly Sinner's Blood

Though her eyes were shut and her head felt as though it were packed in cotton, Jennifer could hear a steady beep-beep-beep to her right. It reminded her of any episode of E.R. ™. She tried to raise her arms, to pull the cotton away from her face and her eyes, but they would go no more than a few inches off the bed she was on. As Jennifer began to panic, the beep-beep-beep of the monitor (if that was what it was) came faster and more high-pitched. Her feet drummed against the bottom of the bed as Jennifer fought her constraints. The straps around her wrists gave away unexpectedly, and Jennifer's hands shot out. She ripped the bandages (bandages?) away from her face and scrubbed furiously at her face. Once her eyes adjusted to the dim light, Jennifer realized that she was, in fact, in a hospital room.

The walls were rusty red and the floor was yellowed and the linoleum peeled away from the walls at the corners. She was alone with the bed, the monitor, an IV, and small dresser. On top of the monitor was a picture; Jennifer picked it up. The young woman in the photo had short, dark hair and a sad, sallow face. The nameplate at the bottom said 'Alessa'. Jennifer frowned. "Alessa? I've heard that name before…but where?" It didn't dawn on her then that Billy had told her a little about an Alessa.

Jennifer swung her legs off the edge of the bed, and stood, still holding the photo. "Alessa, Alessa…how do I know you?" she put the photo back on the monitor; then she screamed. The bed had decayed in only a moment's time. Blood was soaked into it so much that parts of the bed were black. Other parts of the bed were yellow with old dry pus stains. Jennifer fought the urge to vomit, even though she had nothing left to give up. "My god; did they have someone in here? Did they actually use this bed?" She shook her head in disgust and fear. "This is inhumane!" she declared.

Visibly shaken, Jennifer investigated the little shelf dresser. There were a couple of books and a few bottles of pills on it. The books were fairytales. With no real reason other than she could, Jennifer picked up the tattered volume of Grimm's Fairytales. She flipped through it idly, slicing her thumb on one of the pages. A few drops of blood dotted the book; Jennifer stuck the wounded thumb in her mouth. The book in her hand grew hot, and she dropped it with a cry. The book then burst into flames. "What the? Screw this, I'm out of here!" Jennifer ran out of the room.

She found herself in a dark hallway, staring at another door. There were doors up and down the hallway, seeming to stretch for miles. "Where am I? Is this supposed to be a hospital? It's not like any one I've ever been in!" Jennifer's fingers wound themselves into knots as the realization that she stood in a dark hallway in a hellish place with no weapon.

As if to give her insight more weight, a teetering figure limped towards her from the gaping maw of one end of the hallway.

"Hello?" Jennifer called hesitantly as the figure lurched forward. As it neared the light coming from the light over a singular set of stairs in the hall (a light and a staircase Jennifer was entirely grateful for), she could see it wore a nurse's uniform. But under the cardigan…something moved! The hump on the nurse's back moved. The uniform itself was covered in blood, and the thing carried a pipe. "Oh my god…are you…are you okay?" Jennifer asked.

The thing responded by quickening its pace and lifting the pipe high. It brought it down hard and fast, the steel length whistling as it cut through the air. Jennifer danced back with a shouted expletive. She sprinted up the stairs, not looking back though the thing had stopped at the foot of the stairs. She burst through the door at the top of the stairs, and slammed it shut behind her. There was a gurney near it, and Jennifer shoved that in front of the door…just as a precaution.

She leaned against it, chest heaving with exertion. "God all-mighty!" Jennifer sighed, looking around. This floor of the hospital (and it was indeed a hospital; the Red Cross signs were everywhere), was clean and normal looking. Not that normal was a part of Jennifer's vocabulary in this nightmare; but by normal she meant not rusted, bleeding, or trying to kill her.

There was a squawk over her head; Jennifer jumped, expecting one of those bird things that had knocked her off the road to be coming at her. She felt incredibly stupid when she saw the speaker in the corner of the room. A few guitar chords wafted out of the sound system.

"Great. Now I know I'm in Hell; there's Mu-zak." Jennifer sighed. She shook her head and proceeded down the hall to the front desk. Just beyond it was the front doors; she tried them, but they seemed to have been soldered shut. The words from the Mu-zak hadn't really registered with Jennifer as she had been moving, but the double speakers above the door provided excellent sound. The guitar was accompanied by a strange, high-pitched instrument—something that sounded as if a guitar and a violin had mated. Then there was the voice; the words that had gotten her attention and sent fear washing over her all over again.

_He…spoke of torture and souls…_

_So outrageous the toll…_

_You can lose all you have…_

_He refused to give in…_

_To the town that takes…all…_

_Survive…you must have the will…_

_This movie doesn't end the way we want…_

_All the time/ and he shouts at the moon._

_She's gone and fear has overcome…_

_He was walking the Mile/He was walking Alone…_

"I don't remember this one on Rick Dee's countdown." Jennifer said dryly. She looked around, and drew in a shuddering breath. The background music sounded like a recording…but the voice didn't. If she was right (and not just crazy like she wanted to figure) that meant there was someone else in this hell hole; someone alive who wasn't rotting or being ridden by quivering humps of slimy pink flesh, or wearing wigs and trying to kill kids, or any other number of horrors Jennifer had yet to encounter. If he was on the intercom, that meant whoever he was was in one of the offices.

Jennifer scaled the counter, knocking the phone over in the process. She righted it out of habit, even though she doubted anyone was going to call her. Once her hands were off the phone, it rang. "What the…?" Hesitantly, and with nausea boiling in the back of her throat, Jennifer picked up the phone. The voice on the other end of the line picked up where the voice over the intercom left off.

"_So outrageous the toll_

_You can lose all you have_

_He refused to give in_

_To the town that takes…all…_

_Survive…you must have the will…_

_This movie doesn't end the way we want…_

_All the time and he shouts at the moon_

_She's gone and fear has overcome_

_He was walking the mile/He was walking Alone…"_

Jennifer let out a shriek of frustration and slammed the phone down. She was angry now, and tired of being screwed with by the world. "I'm coming for you asshole!" she shouted, barreling through the door into the receptionist office. It was empty. She sighed. "Of course nothing's where it should be. That'd make sense and then I wouldn't be in Hell." She shook her head. Jennifer started rifling through the papers on the desk behind the bulletproof glass. There was a memo about selling something called 'White Claudia'. "White Claudia?" Jennifer frowned and continued to read. "Milky white substance…hallucinations…is it an opiate? Who would sell a natural opiate in a hospital?" She frowned. "Signed by Dr. Michael…Kauffman? Kauffman…I should know that name too. What was he peddling here anyway?" She put the memo back on the desk.

Underneath the couch there was a small notebook. "Looks like someone's notes…" she mused, flipping it open to a random page. "September 16th; poor Alessa. Every time I change her bandages the puss and blood just oozing through. I don't know what in God's name is keeping that child alive! And the bugs; they're everywhere. Their jaws clamp huge holes in my skin, but no one else can see them! It's Dr. Kauffman's fault, I know…the rest of the page is just scribbles." She closed the notebook and checked the name on the front. "Lisa…" Jennifer shrugged. "Whatever…this thing is half-blank…it might come in handy." She justified as she put the notebook back in her pocket. The man was still singing over the intercom as Jennifer left the office.

_Four and twenty dead birds_

_They bleed upon the nest_

_There was no time for reason_

_They had no sign of a threat_

_Now it's too late_

_Too late for me_

_This town will eventually take me_

_Too late_

_Too late for me_

_This town will…_

She crossed the empty hall to go into the office across from the receptionist's office. The placard on the door read 'Michael Kauffman, M.D.' Jennifer took another deep, shuddery breath, steeling herself to go in. She didn't know what she was going to find and she wasn't looking forward to finding anything at all.

The man seated at the desk was young, with messy blonde hair and dull gray eyes. He was wearing priest's robes, complete with collar. His voice was deeper in the small office than it had been over the intercom. He let go off the button on the microphone and turned to her, his lips still moving. The next part of his song, he spoke:

"Through this fog that came along/Dark creatures sing their terrible song/The rest of the bar laughed at him/Only I felt filled with terror/They found him dead the very next day/No more stories from him, though I didn't say/We blamed bad luck for his fate/Only I felt terror so great." The man said; the only animation in his face was the movement of his lips. "There's one more verse Jennifer. Would you like to hear it?" he spoke softly, head cocked inquisitively. His eyes were still dead.

Jennifer stayed in the doorway, wordless. The young man took that as a hint to go on.

_She and He will know_

_That someday_

_All things will end_

_That misty night_

_That dismal moon_

_The dead search for their kin_

_While angels sleep_

_In endless dark_

_The dead seek out sin_

"What do you think Jennifer? Do you understand what I'm telling you?" he reached back and turned the entire intercom system off.

"What's going on? Who are you and how do you know my name?" she demanded.

"You're living their lives, you know." The young man said. He got up, and started to approach her.

"Just stay right where you are; don't come near me!" Jennifer shouted.

"I'm only here to help you Jennifer." The man said softly, reaching into the folds of his robes and pulling out a book. "I have your answers if you want them. But you'll have to find them yourself."

Jennifer threw her hands up in disgust and outrage. "What are you talking about? Nothing here makes sense! I'm so sick of not knowing where I am, and I'm sick of riddles, and I'm sick of things trying to kill me!" Okay…so only three things had tried to kill her; so what? That was three too many.

"You're in the hospital Jennifer. A lot of things have happened in this hospital." The man said.

"To quote a famous t-shirt, shit happens." Jennifer replied snidely.

He shook his head. "You're very impatient Jennifer. That won't do, not in this town. You'll need patience and wit to survive. I figured you knew that." He said sadly.

"This is some kind of coma dream, right? I crashed my car, and I'm in a coma now. Or I'm dead. Either way, none of this is real and nothing here can hurt me." Jennifer turned to walk away.

"Many people who believed that same thing died for it. Others found themselves irreparably harmed." He replied.

"Okay Yoda; enough riddles. I hate riddles." Jennifer said sourly.

"My name is Douglas. All I want to do is help you, but first you have to want to be helped." The man said. He gestured to the loveseat on the wall near the desk he was sitting at. "Sit. Please; this office is safe for the time."

Jennifer snorted, looking left and right at everything except the office and the nutcase that was waiting for her. Movement near the elevators caught her eye. She turned to stare at it.

The elevator doors were opening and closing over and over again. Open/close/open/close; she could see no cab but the lights that indicated what floor it was on kept flashing. "What the…" Jennifer stepped towards the middle of the hallway, mesmerized.

She heard the squeaking of wheels. "Billy?" Jennifer turned around.

A host-less wheelchair came barreling down the hall. Jennifer shrieked once before the wheelchair collided with her shins and knocked her into the seat. The runaway wheelchair veered left and right; it took Jennifer a few dizzying moments to realize she was headed straight for the malfunctioning elevator. She screamed again.

Douglas ran out of the office. "Jennifer!" he cried, running towards her; his robes were cumbersome though, and he was greatly slowed.

The chair reached the elevator before Douglas could reach the chair, and it tipped Jennifer into the waiting elevator. She clung to the ledge with both hands, holding on for dear life. The doors had ceased to open and shut, though it taunted Jennifer by bringing the doors close to her fingers and pulling them away just in time. The chair remained nearby, running over her fingers again and again. She could feel the numb digits giving way under the abuse. "Douglas I'm falling!" she shouted as her left hand slipped away.

Douglas grabbed the chair just as it rolled over Jennifer's right hand. He threw it away from him, sending it careening down the hall past the elevator. He lunged forward, grabbing her hand just as it slid off the ledge. "Help me help you Jennifer!" he shouted, holding her hand with both of his and pulling with all of his might.

Jennifer stretched as far as she could, and got her other hand back on the ledge. Legs kicking against the side wall, Jennifer sought footholds to climb up as Douglas worked feverishly to pull her back up. His hands found her hand, her wrist, her arm, and finally encircled her waist and pulled her the rest of the way up. She fell into him, a surprised gasp escaping her chest.

Douglas was quick to let go. "Forgive my impropriety." He muttered, turning away from her and striding quickly back towards Kauffman's office.

Jennifer jogged to catch up with him. "It's okay; really." She dodged past him and turned back to him, walking backwards down the hall. "Not bad for a priest." She kidded lamely.

Douglas shook his head sadly. "I've more sins to make up for; keeping you from an early grave doesn't even begin to cover them."

"A sinning priest? I'd make a joke, but I doubt the Pope would approve." Jennifer replied, having no strong religious affiliation herself. She preferred to be a live-and-let-live kind of girl…unless it was a bug. Then it had to die.

"Your things are in the office. Go and get them." Douglas replied coolly.

Jennifer turned around again and ran into the office. She found her old backpack and the ax on the other side of the sofa. "Thanks a lot." She said, not turning around as she shrugged back into the backpack.

"The tome with your answers is on the desk." Douglas said.

Jennifer frowned; his voice sounded odd, as though he were trying to speak through an asthma attack. She turned around and found the young blonde man impaled on the tip of a huge blade. Blood spread out in torrents from the wound; when the blade was withdrawn Douglas crumbled to the floor like a paper doll. Jennifer screamed; eyes wide and unbelieving. Dead? He couldn't be dead! She was just talking to him!

The burly man in the wig was the one wielding the knife. "You naughty, naughty girl!" he screamed in falsetto. "Leaving the House and then running off with that harlot career woman! You must be punished! You've become unclean!" With that out of the way, he charged into the room, swinging the monstrous blade over his head.

Jennifer had no time to scream; she could only leap and roll and dodge as the wig-man tried again and again to put her to pieces. She looked around wildly for the door; it was gone! There was no escape from the room! That mean there was only one thing she had to do. "I can't…" She whispered, tripping on the edge of the coffee table and sprawling out on the floor. She sank into the carpet, wet with Douglas' blood. Blinded by blood and tears, Jennifer crawled on soaked hands and knees.

"…the ax…" Douglas wheezed.

"Holy shit you're alive!" Jennifer shouted, staring wildly at the wig-man. He had gotten his monstrous blade stuck in the ceiling of all places, and was having a hell of a time getting it down. It would have been funny if it weren't a life-and-death situation.

"Use…the ax…he is no man…but monster…eater of children's souls…stop him; before he…gets yours…" Blood bubbled up on Douglas' lips. "Stop him…" he pleaded.

The wig-man was still struggling with the blade in the ceiling. Expletives flew from his lips that not even Jennifer had come up with before; her ax was just past him, still at the edge of the sofa. She had maybe a ten-second window before the wig-man decided to kill her bare-handed. Jennifer took a deep breath and darted forward. She just got the ax as the wig-man managed to wriggle the blade free from the ceiling. Taking no time to aim, Jennifer swung blindly and struck the wig-man in the back of his legs. He bellowed and dropped the blade; Jennifer had to tuck her legs up to her knees to avoid losing anything.

The blade of the ax was sharper than it appeared; it had gone threw muscle and bone with no problem. The wig-man toppled forward onto useless stubs before landing on his face. Still alive, his meaty hands flailed wildly, searching for her unwary legs. Choking back tears, Jennifer got up and buried the ax in the middle of his back. With one final yell, the wig-man fell still and silent. She stared at the body for a few moments; she'd never killed anything bigger than a palmetto bug…and this…this used to be human! Then it struck her—"Oh god; Douglas!" Jennifer edge past the wig-man, whose blood spilled out to join Douglas' on the carpet.

Douglas was still wheezing, but something in his eyes had changed. They were alive now; more alive than when Jennifer had first found him. "You need…the blood of…the sacred one. The saint who…will protect…your world…from this…" he coughed, spewing more blood onto Jennifer.

There was so much blood everywhere; Jennifer couldn't believe the human body held so much; even with the wig-man spilling his on the floor, there was so much blood to be seen it was as though the carpet itself were bleeding too!

Douglas grabbed Jennifer's hand, and put it on his stomach. "The blood of the saint…to counter the mark of Samael…" he choked out.

Jennifer snatched her hand away; something on it caught her eye. She stared at the palm, where the light bulb in the attic had burned her. There; in the center…the circle and runes, the pyramid and the eye; the mark that made her head ache so. "Samael…?" she whispered. Even as she spoke, the burn lessened in intensity, until it was nothing more than a series of white lines.

"Inside Jennifer; inside me, inside you. Do it." Douglas hissed. He grabbed her wrist, and thrust her fingers into his wound.

She tried to break away, to pull her fingers out. It was as though she had sunk her fingers deep into a rotting apple pie. Then the tips of her fingers brushed something smooth, and reflexively she took it.

As the bottle came away from him, Douglas smiled. Across his forehead, the numbers '091211' appeared. Then he laid still, eyes glossy and mouth slack.

Jennifer looked at the bottle in her hand. Inside was the same red, shimmering liquid she had seen in the movie. "Aglophotis…" she whispered. Jennifer looked down sadly at Douglas. She closed his eyes with bloodstained hands, and tried to push his mouth shut too; but it wouldn't yield.

She got up slowly, and on shaking knees. The one door out of the room had reappeared, at once reigniting Jennifer's rage. She really was quite tired of being screwed with; shoving the bottle in her hand, to rest beside the book Douglas had offered in the beginning, Jennifer stormed out of the blood-soaked office, wishing for a bathroom and an end to this nightmare…


	4. Nursing the Bottles

Once the door to the office was shut (for good thanks to Jennifer's trusty ax), she fell against the door, sobbing. "Why God? Why!" she screamed uselessly. She turned and kicked the busted door, cursing loudly as her toes protested the abuse. 'Enough Jennifer!' she scolded herself. "Quit being a jackass and go find a way out of here." She said out loud, turning back and approaching the elevator with caution…just in case another killer wheelchair came bounding out of nowhere. The doors were opened and still, the floor lights off. Still, Jennifer was beyond cautious when she stuck her hand between the doors and waggled it around. Then she edged closer and looked down, not offering her head in case the elevator got back into a killing mood.

She nearly toppled down the empty shaft when her cell phone rang and scared the holy hell out of her. Only sheer will kept her from joining the shadows on the bottom; she fell backwards and nearly broke the ringing cell phone, though when she withdrew it from her back pocket, it was relatively fine. Jennifer put it to her ear without pressing the ON-button. It struck her as a stupid move to keep playing by normal rules. "Hello?" Jennifer said hesitantly.

"Did you really think it was going to be so easy child?"

Jennifer almost dropped the phone. It was that damn falsetto she had just planted an ax in. "What the—who the—what in hell's name is going on?" she demanded.

"Funny you should mention Hell, child. That's where I'm calling from, you know. After you planted that righteous ax in my back, I was a little upset with you." The falsetto got smoother, more melodious as it taunted her.

"Yeah…I would have figured that if I cared." Jennifer got to her feet, frowning. "If you're in Hell, why aren't you busy writhing in flames? I'm sure there are other things in Hell to do than bother me." Jennifer toured up and down the hallway, knocking against doors and peeking inside rooms.

"I'm not in the hospital anymore my child. There's someone here who wants to speak to you. I'm sure you'd be interested in talking to him." There was a rustling noise, and Jennifer could hear the dead man's voice barking orders.

"Jennifer?" the voice was timid…young…

"Billy!" she shouted. "Are you okay?" Jennifer stopped.

"Sister's so mad at you. She says you messed up her hair." Billy replied. His voice sounded so tinny, and static was starting to creep into the line.

"Billy, I can hardly hear you; are you okay?" Jennifer repeated.

"Did you get the secret book? Douglas wasn't supposed to give that to you. He was supposed to push you in the elevator. That's why Sister punished him." Half his words were lost to static, but Jennifer got the picture.

"Billy, listen to me. I want you to get away from Sister, and I want you to help me find you." Jennifer said slowly, shouting as the static got worse.

"Find the nurse. She'll get you out." Billy said before the line went totally dead.

"Billy! Billy!" Jennifer almost hurled the cell phone into the wall. "Great. Now I get to go search a dead body for a key to a door I don't even know where it is." She groaned. Then she sighed. "The nurse…I aught to go back to the basement and check." She mused, remembering the lurching figure that had first attacked her.

Though armed, Jennifer was wary of returning to the black corridor. The thought of flailing blindly in the dark against things she couldn't see until they were right in her face did not appeal to Jennifer. She wondered what Billy had meant by 'the secret book'. Was there something in the book that was important? Something she needed to know in order to get out of Silent Hill?

Jennifer debated about staying in the open hallway to read the book. It seemed like a quasi-good idea, until she heard a faint creaking sound in the distance. She thought about Billy's ancient tricycle…and then the wheelchair. She didn't care to stand and take a chance. She opened a door as softly as she could and slipped inside the room without incident, and shut the door tight behind her. "Jeez…I could really use a break about now. Or some help…Help would be good too." She looked around. It was a storage room; the shelves were bare though, except for a few bottles half-full of a strange white semi-fluid. "Creepy…it kind of looks like…" Jennifer stopped, and picked up a bottle. She turned it over in her hands. There was blood caked around the top of the bottle, like someone with a bloody nose had drunk out of it and then put the cap on. Chills made Jennifer shake so bad she dropped the bottle. It shattered and the stuff inside spread out into a small, nearly perfectly-shaped circle on the floor. Jennifer had jumped back when the stuff inside spilt out; now she approached cautiously. "Weird…" she whispered, looking around for a stick or something so she could poke it. The surface of the circle started to quiver, then bubble. Jennifer tried to run out the door, but found it locked. "Of course!" she kicked the door hard before running to the other pair of doors on the opposite side of the room. They were hopelessly locked too.

The white puddle was starting to rise up in the middle, as though it had become elastic and something on the other side was pressing against it. Jennifer pounded the doors, hoping for some kind of give. She thought about attacking the rising white sludge with her ax; that thought was quickly abandoned as she considered the possibility of having more than one goo monster on her hands. The only thing left to do was wait it out; maybe whatever was inside was a bit less mean than the mirror-monster. Frightened, confused, and more than a little tired, Jennifer sank against the door, eyes glued to the white puddle. She still didn't know what it was, though her mind was racing to find some kind of answer. Then it hit; Kauffman's memo back in the reception room! The good doctor had mentioned White Claudia being brilliant when it was distilled—what she had thought had been bizarre drug slang had actually been a less-recognized use of the same word. Feeling like an idiot, Jennifer tried to remember if Kauffman had mentioned anything else about his wonder-drug…like what the hell it was for and why the hell did it dance around?

Jennifer watched the spilt drug intently, still pondering its properties and waiting for any sign that it was headed in her direction. She still wasn't really sure what she was going to do about that, but she was going to do something damn it! When the puddle stopped moving all of a sudden, Jennifer didn't go over to investigate it. She figured she'd been stupid enough about the whole matter already.

The puddle didn't seem to appreciate her eyes-off attitude. Without any warning whatsoever, it shot towards her where she sat with her back to the door. She rolled away, and it slid under the door. On hands and knees that were caked with drying blood, Jennifer crawled back to the door and tried to peer through the crack at the bottom. At first there was nothing, but then she could see shadows that moved, as if someone were pacing in front of the doorway. Then there was a pitiful knocking sound, as though someone very weak were pounding on the doors. "Harry? Harry, please…" a woman's voice moaned.

Jennifer kicked away from the door out of panic, and got to her feet. Her feet against the door hadn't had any impact on the woman on the other side. She was still sobbing and pounding and begging someone named Harry to help her. "Um…I'm not Harry." She called out lamely.

"Please let me out." The woman on the other side replied, sounding pitiful.

"You're not gonna…kill me if I do, are you?" It seemed stupid to ask a resident of this place to be honest, but Jennifer gave it a shot anyway. After all, logic was on hiatus here; maybe running around evil Silent Hill was like being in the Labyrinth—you just had to ask the right questions.

"What? No; why?" the woman sounded very surprised.

"Lady, you wouldn't believe me if I told you." Jennifer replied, pulling on the door handles out of habit, though she still half-figured the door to be locked.

It wasn't, and Jennifer was assaulted by the woman inside, grabbed and held onto for dear life. The smell of blood and something stronger, something darker wafted up from the woman. Jennifer was holding her breath and she was debating the brilliance of her last move. At last the woman let go, and Jennifer found herself staring at a face that—had it not been covered with thick blackened blood—might have been friendly and welcome. Fear robbed her of her breath to scream, and of her ability to run in the opposite direction. In the long run, that was probably a really good thing.

"You're not Harry." The other girl replied, head cocked to the side. Her eyes were solid black (as if there was nothing left in the sockets), but they glittered with vague intelligence.

"Um…yeah, that's pretty true." Jennifer managed to choke out. Wit too had fled her.

"But you let me out." The girl smiled. "You let me out…" she repeated.

Jennifer nodded. "Yeah…um; who are you?" she really wanted to kick herself for sounding so empty-headed. She was wasting a lot of time with nothing in particular, and it felt as though she really had no time to waste.

"My name is Lisa. I'm a nurse in this hospital." The girl replied.

"Lisa?" the name did more than ring a bell; it broke the damn thing. Jennifer reached into her back pocket. "This is yours then; I found it under a couch in the office." She offered it shyly.

Lisa was soaked with blood from head to foot, but no hump grazed her shoulder blades. She just looked as though she'd been in a terribly wreck…but that smell! That horrible smell of blood and something…something that made Jennifer think of Biology class for some strange reason. However, Lisa took back the note book without attempting to kill, maim, or terrify her, so Jennifer liked her considerably better than anyone else she'd met in the hospital.

"My name's Jennifer. I seem to be…" what was she? Stuck? That didn't seem right. Trapped? Closer, but still…Jennifer kept winding up in different locales so she really wasn't trapped per se… "Unable to get out of here." She finished after only a few seconds of silence. It sounded lame, but it was the top layer of truth and it was all Jennifer had to offer. "Can you tell me anything about that stuff?" she asked, pointing to one of the bottles on the shelf.

Lisa's face contorted and she collapsed, sobbing. Shocked and unsure what to do, Jennifer held her hands out in surrender. "I'm sorry! I'm sorry! I was just asking, I didn't mean anything by it! Forget I said anything!" she cried.

Lisa looked up at her. "Kaufmann; he killed so many people with the Claudia. He was worse than any pimp pusher in any city. He snuck it into patient's food and IVs to get them addicted and people who told…oh, people who told were punished, punished, word of God, they were punished." She babbled. It seemed as though Lisa was fast losing her sanity.

"Is that what happened here, in this hospital? Kauffman peddled his drugs?" Jennifer asked, wondering just what in the hell this had to do with anything else.

"Then he gave it to Alessa and it did something, it made her live but she wouldn't heal/couldn't heal and Kauffman just kept pouring the drugs into her IV and he told her mother, her crazy religious mother that it was good for her it would make her strong to bear God and I thought they were all crazy and I wanted to leave and I wanted to tell so badly but Kauffman gave it to me and I don't know how but then the bugs came and ate my skin and things began to change…then Harry came and I thought he could save me but I was damned and doomed all at once and he left me in this room until I died but then I went to Hell and I saw Kauffman and I HELD HIM and I DAMNED him with me!" Lisa shouted.

"O….o….okay." Jennifer said, drawing out the O to buy some time. Lisa had definitely lost it and she had no idea how to handle that. Then she realized what Lisa had just said, and she understood at last why the smell had bothered her. It was the smell of sulfa and poorly preserved flesh; something she had become familiar with during dissection in Biology. That meant Lisa wasn't anything but the walking dead that somehow managed to pretend to live. "At least he got his." She replied.

Lisa nodded. "He got his, he got DAMNED and I DAMNED HIM but I DAMNED MYSELF TOO and I just want out of this nightmare, I want to die an honest death and no one can help me." Lisa moaned. Then she reached out and grabbed Lisa's pant leg, clinging for dear life. She didn't seem to be bothered by or even notice the blood-caked knees. Or maybe it brought her comfort, that there was someone else wandering around the hospital covered in blood. "I have the key to get out, but I'm not allowed to use it. I can't leave her until I've died an honest death."

"And what exactly is an…honest death?" Jennifer asked hesitantly.

Lisa's eyes sparkled and she smiled. "Someone has to has to has to kill me, I can't kill myself because that would be a sin so I have to find someone to kill me kill me kill me."

"Oh no, no way. I'm sorry but no." Jennifer shook her head. "I am NOT killing anyone else today, sorry." She tried to pull her leg free of Lisa's grasp.

"You don't understand!" the woman wailed. "I'm DAMNED, DAMNED, DAMNED, DAMNED! I don't want to be DAMNED anymore; I didn't do anything worth being DAMNED for!" Lisa let go of her pant leg and was frantically patting her cardigan. "Here! The key for the door in Alessa's room; you need this, right? I can't use it, I'm not allowed but you can!" Lisa was almost drooling with excitement. It was incredibly gross and creepy to watch.

"Alessa's room? In the basement?" Jennifer asked.

Lisa nodded.

"There's only one door there. I know; I've been there." She replied.

"No; in the walls there's another door; I've seen it…it taunts me." Lisa said.

"Show me this other door Lisa; if you're lucky, you might get killed along the way." Jennifer said as she offered the other woman a hand. It sounded horrible to her ears, but Jennifer was ready to say anything to get the crazy woman to stop begging her to perform an execution.

"You think?" Lisa asked hopefully as she took Jennifer's hand and struggled to her feet.

"You never know. I almost died a bunch of times on the way here." Jennifer replied as she tried to take her hand back. The blood caked on Lisa's hands was gooey and truly unpleasant.

"I'm so tired." Lisa said as Jennifer led them out of the room. "So very tired…" she whispered. Jennifer hoped Lisa wasn't going to lay her head on her shoulder. Her tolerance for gross had already been grossly exceeded, and as nice as Lisa seemed (when she wasn't ranting like a 'roid-raging athlete) the smell of death and sulfa was making Jennifer dizzy. Luckily, it wasn't too far to the gurney-barred basement…

Lisa's hand was trembling in hers. "Are you okay?" Jennifer asked.

"So many bad things…have happened in that basement." Lisa replied haltingly. Her eyes were wide with fear.

"It'll be okay." Jennifer assured her. "But maybe you should hang onto my shirt instead of my hand, so I can use the ax if I need to."

Lisa hesitated. "You're not going to leave me here, are you?" she asked pitifully.

"No; I just need two hands free to use this." Jennifer replied, meaning the ax. She kicked the gurney out of the way, making sure it landed on its side so its wheels were useless; she really wasn't going to take any chance if she could help it. Lisa stepped back, and clasped two blood-gummy hands to Jennifer's shirt. Jennifer swallowed reflexively, and then opened the door to the basement slowly. Nothing was waiting for her at the top of the stairs; that was a good sign…right?

The thing that had first tried to attack Jennifer was nowhere in sight. She wasn't sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing. Lisa seemed disappointed. "I thought you said someone was down here." She said accusingly. "I thought you said I could die here." She whispered.

Jennifer shrugged. "Look, there was something down here trying to kill me when I got here. I didn't kill IT when I ran up the stairs so IT has to be around here somewhere." She replied. Sweat crawled down her back, seemingly hairy as it treaded the hot, dust-filled air.

"You lied to me!" Lisa's voice was savage. Her grip on Jennifer's shirt tightened.

Jennifer shook her head, and tried to turn to face Lisa. The other woman's grip on her shirt was too hard; she couldn't turn all the way around. "I didn't lie Lisa; I said you might get killed." She said soothingly. "I didn't make any promises." She pointed out.

That turned out to be a big mistake. "You're just as evil as the rest of them; Dahlia and Kauffman and Harry too!" Lisa's fury made her bloodied frame shake. "Liar; liar!"

Jennifer struggled to get away; she heard the seam over her left shoulder rip; that had to be the side Lisa had her best grip on. "Lisa, let go. You're not thinking right." She tried her best to sound sincere and gentle.

"Everyone always lies to me!" Lisa bellowed, suddenly letting go. Jennifer pitched forward, loosening her grip on the ax as she sought to stop her fall. "No more lies!" she shrieked, reaching for Jennifer. Her fingers were hooked like claws, and her teeth were bared. She didn't look like she wanted to talk anymore.

"Lisa, please!" Jennifer shouted. "Stop! I'm not lying to you! I never lied to you!" she pleaded. "Stop it now Lisa; I don't want to hurt you! Don't force me to fight you!"

Jennifer's pleas fell on deaf ears. Lisa was gone, replaced with a hellish denizen of Silent Hill in a nurse's uniform. The thing clawed and snapped and left a dozen scratches, cuts, and bruises on Jennifer. She tried to dodge, but the cumbersome backpack and her ax slowed her down too greatly. They also threw off her center-of-gravity; a well-timed lunge of Lisa's sent Jennifer sprawling to the ground. The ax bounced out of her hand and just to the tip of her fingertips. Lisa was on her in an instant, clawed hands wrapped around her throat and squeezing with more force than Jennifer would have thought possible in the nurse's frame.

Jennifer's vision blurred at the edges and there were pinpoint flashes of light dancing around. Blindly her fingers scrambled for the ax though her brain wasn't registering the struggle. Her other hand was on Lisa's chest, pushing with as much strength as she could muster.

Lisa was screaming indecipherable messages to God and anyone else she could think of; she was too absorbed in the violence to notice Jennifer's fingers pulling on the ax or to register that Jennifer had gotten her hand all the way around the handle.

Responding with only instinct, Jennifer swung the ax as hard as she could; though it couldn't really do much good. The ax was in her left hand and Jennifer was right-hand dominant. Still, the ax was in such good condition, even after the wig-man's backside; it hit the side of Lisa's head and split it like overripe cantaloupe. Lisa pitched sideways, her fingers losing their grip on Jennifer's throat. It took Jennifer a few moments of lying on her side, knees curled to her chest, to get her breath back. It took even longer in that position for her to realize what she'd done.

"Oh god…oh Lisa, what have I done? I'm so sorry…" Cold tears splashed down on Lisa's unmoving corpse. Jennifer was shaking with untold sobs. She bowed her head. "Lisa…please forgive me…" she whispered.

The part of Lisa's face that wasn't broken was slack and peaceful. In the end she had gotten what she'd desired; an honest death. Unlike Jennifer, she was no longer condemned.

The thought of looking over Lisa's dead body for a key sickened Jennifer so much she had to retreat to a corner of the hall and heave, though there was nothing left in her stomach to give up. When Jennifer returned to Lisa's body, green and still shaking, she noticed the red notebook in Lisa's hand. "That…wasn't…there before." Jennifer picked the notebook out of Lisa's cooling hand with two fingers. She squeezed it in her hand. "I hope wherever you've gone it's a whole lot better than where you were ten minutes ago." Jennifer told her. She opened the notebook, flipping past random notes and entries, until she was almost at the end of the book. On one of the last few pages was a doodle of a key. Jennifer stared at it. "You have GOT to be shitting me. I went through all this for a goddamn doodle?" she demanded of the empty room. Jennifer then sighed. Of course it was going to be something stupid she had had to risk her neck over; that was the whole point of this place, wasn't it? To drive her crazy? It was doing a damn good job of it; that was for sure.

She went back into the room with the rotting bed; Alessa's picture was in it…that meant it had to be her room, right? On the far wall, there was a drawing Jennifer hadn't noticed before. It was of a door, and it was an ugly door at that. "Damn that's ugly; whoever did it would've made a great bride for Dali." She declared, ripping the piece of paper with the key on it out of the notebook. She looked at it, and then at the ugly door. "If this works, as soon as I'm done with this hell hole I'm playing the Lotto." Jennifer declared, pushing the scrap against the illustrated door hole.

Surprisingly enough, it worked. Of course, by this time, Jennifer wasn't surprised. A sort of veil had fallen over her mind, working well to dull the extreme range of emotions she was battling at the moment. That was a good thing; as badly as she wanted to cry and scream over what she had done, the rotting hospital room wasn't the time or the place. Jennifer stepped through the opened door, fully expecting to not see the other side…


	5. Coming Out of the Closet

Jennifer walked through the paper doorway and into a small, dark room. She could smell old shoes. "And whose closet am I in now?" she wondered, opening the door cautiously and peeking out. The room was ordinary enough. There was a nightstand with a lamp and a phone on it; that was next to a neatly made bed. Over in the far corner was a desk littered with scrapbook supplies and shreds of paper. A couple of pictures marked the walls and there were two windows facing out, though their shades were half-drawn. "Um…hello?" Jennifer called. She stepped out of the closet, swiveling her head left to right, scanning the room. "Really sorry I'm coming out of your closet…um…don't kill me?" she pleaded lamely.

There was no one in the room to remark on how dorky she sounded. For that, Jennifer was more than grateful. Her first move was to try to phone. She punched the numbers for 9-1-1 before bringing the phone to her ear—there was no dial tone, and upon closer inspection (meaning she yanked the phone off the nightstand) she discovered the line had been cut. Jennifer peeked out the windows; there was the backside of a brownstone staring back at her, and a partial view of an empty street. The pictures on the walls were various sites from around Silent Hill; a resident on a bike during a sunny day, some of the waterfront, an old store front. Jennifer went back to the closet to grab her ax; to her muted surprise, the door she had come in was gone. Still, she gave the back of the closet a good jab just to make sure nothing was going to come up behind her. She also checked under the bed and the desk. Luckily, there were no mirrors in the room. Shouldering her backpack, Jennifer headed to the only other door in the room, and stepped out into the hall beyond with great trepidation.

There was no blood or rust anywhere; just decidedly 'blah' cream paint on the walls and cheap gray carpet on the floor beneath her feet. There was a door opposite the bedroom Jennifer had just come out of. When she opened it, she discovered a very bizarre bathroom.

There was a hole in the wall that had succeeded in obliterating the mirror over the sink. The sink was cracked and parts had broken off; the pieces crunched under Jennifer's shoes as she walked further into the bathroom. The toilet was clogged, the water in the bowl brown and murky. The shower seemed to have exploded with blood; it dripped from the walls and pooled in the bottom of the tub. The steady plink plink plink of blood into the tub grated on Jennifer's nerves, and she reached out and turned the handle. It stopped, and nothing slithered up from the blood pool to grab her wrist or anything. "I don't know what the hell happened here, but I am so glad nothing's trying to kill me." Jennifer mused, examining the hole in the wall. It seemed to have been cemented shut, though the outer edges were decorated with the same strange runes that marked every other circle she had encountered that day. Examining the little armoire of towels yielding nothing except the smell of fabric softener. "At least the psycho who lives here does laundry." She said as she exited the bathroom. She realized she was talking to herself; that probably wasn't a good sign. But there was no other sound to be had, and even though her voice was shaky and her words stupid, they were something to be heard in that still, dead air.

The hallway to the main part of the apartment was blissfully short. Jennifer found a laundry room; empty of course except of the random junk people tended to store with their washers and dryers. The kitchen was empty except for some pots on the stove and a few glasses beside the sink.

The living room was unsettling. It was modestly decorated, most of the pieces from the Goodwill Boutique de la College Student (Jennifer had become an expert in that style of decorating in the past few years). The TV was dust free and nicely sized—she now knew where a good chunk of the decorating budget had gone. There was a record/tape combination player on the shelf, with a handful of books. A footlocker next to the TV deferred nothing more dangerous than a 9-iron; but that was lighter than the ax so Jennifer put the ax in the foot locker and gave the 9-iron a couple of practice swings. It was good in her hands, and if the head broke off, well then she had herself a nice stabbing instrument, now didn't she? There were more pictures of Silent Hill around the living room, including a picture of the apartment buildings towards the center of town—Jennifer wondered if that was where she was. "Southside's pretty bitchin'." She mused, disturbed that the thought of renting living space in Silent Hill had even pretended to cross her mind.

More pictures sat on a mini-bar next to the couch. They were of another tow-headed child, though this one didn't resemble Billy in anyway. This child had saddened and wide brown eyes and he stood before the Wish House. In the next he was a teen, standing alone near a woman whose blonde hair reminded Jennifer of the wig the homicidal maniac had been wearing. The third was the same young man again, slightly older in a cap and gown. He looked sane enough, but… "In this place, who the fuck knows…" Jennifer mused. "And I'm _still _talking to myself. Great…" Glancing around, she noticed the mini-bar had been moved sometime recently. There were still pits in the carpet from where the legs had dug in. Curious and ignoring the potential for serious consequence, Jennifer pulled the mini-bar away from the wall.

The smell of sawdust and fresh spackle invaded her nose. There was a patch in the corner that didn't quite match the rest of the wall, and on the short wall next to it, Jennifer could just making out the words 'Eileen never knew…'. "Who the hell is Eileen?" Jennifer shook her head and put the mini-bar back.

The sound of keys in the door sent Jennifer scampering back to the bedroom. She tripped over her own feet, and wound up sprawled face-down on the carpet. On hands and knees she scrambled to the corner of the hallway; the front door had slammed shut, meaning that someone had come in and would probably be keen enough to notice the bedroom door opening and closing.

With her back to the wall and her knees to her chest, Jennifer waited to be discovered…


	6. Evil is a Resident of Silent Hill

The young man deposited his bags on the kitchen counter, and passed the short hallway on his way to the answering machine. There was a beep, and a small voice said "messages…erased". He then returned to the kitchen area, all the while avoiding looking down the short hallway. Jennifer had the sinking suspicion that he knew she was there, that he was only humoring her until he could call the cops or kill her or something. It had, after all, been that kind of day.

After dallying in the kitchen, the young man went to the footlocker beside the TV. He drew out the ax, and eyed it with mild confusion. "How odd." He remarked. "I don't remember having this here." With a shrug he replaced it in the footlocker.

Growing more uneasy as the young man went about his daily life only a few feet from her poorly chosen hiding spot, Jennifer waited for the young man to leave before she got back to her feet. She could hear voices just on the other side of the door; when she peeked out, she could see the young man talking to a young woman—he called her 'Eileen'. Half-curious as to whether or not that was the Eileen that 'never knew…' but more concerned with how she would explain her presence to the owner of the apartment, Jennifer paced the living room nervously. Her mother had taught her that upfront and honest was the best way to be; maybe she'd luck out and the guy wouldn't be as psychotic as most of the other people she had met today. Hell, maybe he'd even have an idea of what was going on…or at least have the capability of understanding how she'd magically gotten into his apartment through a paper doodle.

The man came in, whistling cheerfully. He had turned to shut the door behind him, missing Jennifer sitting on the couch. When he turned around and finally saw her after all this time, the most he did was utter a surprise 'oh!' and wear a moderately shocked look. "Hello." He said, his voice soothing and low. "Who are you?"

Jennifer studied him. His hair was shoulder length; blonde though the original color must've been brown (she could see the roots) and his face was generically handsome enough to blend into a crowd. He was average height and average build—abnormally normal in every way except his eyes…they were bright blue and shining as though with fever. "Um…" she began nervously, though her throat closed up and she found speech impossible.

"I don't get many visitors here who don't use the front door." He said, smiling softly. Something in the smile shook her further; it was…sly. Sly and shady and most definitely one Jennifer did NOT want directed at her.

"Uh…" she tried again. The man came across the room and stood at the edge of the coffee table. He offered a hand; the cuff of his blue trench coat was soaked. It looked black and ominous against his pale white skin.

"My name is Walter. Walter Sullivan. Welcome to my apartment." With that, he grabbed her wrist and pulled Jennifer to her feet. Though his face remained blandly calm, his fingers dug into her arm with surprising ferocity. "Now please Miss; why are you in my home, and why are you holding my golf club?"

Her knees shook and the only thing she could stammer out was "Did you know your bathroom's totally soaked with blood and please don't kill me!"

The man calling himself Walter Sullivan cocked his head quizzically at her jumbled statement, and loosened his grip. "Kill you? Why would I do that?" he asked.

Jennifer managed to pull her hand free. She massaged her wrist, the red finger marks hot to the touch. "It's been that kind of day." She replied as the first onset of a fresh panic attack tried to dance on her already jangled nerves. "And your bathroom really is covered in blood."

Walter sighed. "That happens sometimes. I think perhaps Mother is ill." He said with a sad little shrug.

"Mother?" Jennifer asked. There had been no one else in the apartment the entire time she had cowered there.

He laughed, and held his arms out. "Meet my mother. We both should like very much to meet you now."

What few warning bells hadn't been going off in her head now set to screaming full blast. Jennifer managed to force her name and a smile out, even as her eyes gazed longingly at the only exit in the room. The more she stared at the front door, the further it seemed to get.

"It's good to meet you Jennifer." Walter said. He pointed to the couch. "Please sit while I see what's wrong."

As soon as he was out of sight in the bathroom, Jennifer sprinted over the coffee table to the front door. A mass of chains covered it just as her fingers brushed the knob. They were thick, heavy metal chains that looped and crossed before the doorway. Not even Houdini could have made an escape out of that mess. Tears welled up in Jennifer's eyes as she realized she was probably going to join the rest of the mess in the bathroom. She heard the bathroom door open, but failed to make it back to the couch before Walter caught up with her. He grabbed her shoulder just as she reached the coffee table. "Please. Sit." He said, eyes and teeth glittering strangely. "I do so hate for guests to be uncomfortable." With that he pushed Jennifer back to the couch.

The golf club (which she had tucked into the backpack strap for safe keeping) poked a hole into the couch as Jennifer landed on it. The apartment filled with the strong smell of rotted meat. Stomach rolling, Jennifer didn't dare look back behind her to see what she was sitting on or how the frail handle of the golf-club had managed to uncover such a god-awful smell.

On the small table to her left, a lamp and phone sat innocuously. Walter leaned over her to turn the lamp on; even his skin had that faint scent of something long dead. The bloody bathroom was becoming less and less of a mystery in the back of Jennifer's mind; however, in the forefront she was too busy trying not to scream and vomit.

The phone rang. It rang three times before Walter noticed to pick it up; he had been staring at Jennifer in the lamp light the entire time. With each ring, the apartment had changed a little. On the first ring, a thick reddish dust had settled on everything. On the second, the windows boarded themselves over with blood-stained cardboard and there were thousands of red handprints along the furniture and smears of blood on the walls and floor. On the third, death and rot had been so thick on the air that Jennifer almost keeled over. She could see bits of something stretched on a rack, drying above the washer that was no longer hidden behind a door. She did not want to recognize it for what it was, even though the _Cynthia_ tattoo decorated with roses was a dead give away.

"It's for you." Walter said, seemingly oblivious to the changes in the apartment. He held the phone out to her. In three rings, he had changed too! His hair was matted and the tips were clumped together with blood. His face was red where blood had to have splattered across it. His clothes had gone from fairly nice to street-tramp condition in less than a minute, and they too were soaked with blood.

Jennifer gingerly accepted the phone, for it too was stained with blood and something darker…nothing she wanted on her fingers. "H-h-hello?" she whispered, watching Walter nervously as he went into the kitchen. She saw him open the fridge and draw out a package wrapped in butcher's paper. She turned away before she saw what was in it.

"You're in a bad place." A childish voice told her.

Though scared enough to wet herself, Jennifer breathed a sigh of relief. If the voice on the phone had been falsetto, that would have been the final straw. "Billy? Billy honey, how did you get this number?" Jennifer asked sweetly, seeing Walter jump in the corner of her eye.

"You're in a very bad place." Billy repeated. "You need to come to school. Me and Miriam are here." He said. "This place isn't as bad as the place you're in."

"Billy, the door is locked." Jennifer whispered. "There are chains. I can't get out because of the chains Billy."

"In the secret book that you got. It has all the secrets of Silent Hill in it." He told her. "You just have to read the right part."

"Billy? Billy, I can't hear you." Jennifer said, a note of hysteria creeping into her voice. Billy and Miriam were at the school…the school! Billy and Miriam…it couldn't be though; it couldn't be her childhood coming back to haunt her. She wasn't here, sitting in a blood-soaked death-reeking living room with a lunatic; holding a bloody phone and talking to a little boy who couldn't possible exist now. She wasn't here, and no one could convince her otherwise.

The static over the phone got worse. "The book." Billy managed to get over the line before the phone went completely dead in her hand.

"Who was that?" Walter called from the kitchen.

"Just a boy I know." Jennifer called back breathlessly. He was still working in the kitchen; she had time to look in the book. Just not the courage…until Walter drew a butcher's cleave off the wall and began attacking whatever was in the white package. That was all the bolster Jennifer needed to drag the book out and flip through the pages.

There were blank pages and pages of pictures and words that didn't make sense and the mark of Samael, the beast. Jennifer flipped through the book back and forth, back and forth, wondering what she was looking for. As she drew her finger across another page, the faded gilded edge cut a deep furlough in her finger. "Ouch!" she yelped, putting the finger to her mouth. A drop of blood made it from her finger to the blank page before, and the blood crept along invisible lines on the page until it seemed to fill in slight furrows of the page.

Spidery script, in her own blood, mocked her from the page.

…_and rather than become dinner for the angry giant, Jack leapt from the window of the giant castle and scurried down the beanstalk back to his home. The giant followed, but being so large and cumbersome he fell all the way down the beanstalk, hitting the ground with such force that his body left a giant crater; and with a great roar of indignation, the giant was dead and Jack…_

Jennifer stared blankly at the page. What the hell kind of clue was that? Nothing in 'Jack and the Beanstalk' had anything to do with what she was going through. She would have been better off with a copy of 'Alice in Wonderland'! Disgusted, she shut the book despairingly and looked up to see Walter looming over her.

"Oh…" he said, sounding out of breath. "You've cut yourself." He murmured, taking her hand away from her mouth and staring at her finger. He began to squeeze.

"OW! LET GO!" Jennifer bellowed, struggling to pull her hand away. A thin trickle of blood crept from her finger into Walter's sleeve and wrist, and a few drops dotted the dingy carpet.

"Blood is so very important. We need it to live…to be a family…" Walter murmured, staring at her finger in rapture. "It's such a wondrous thing, blood…"

Eyes searching the room madly as she struggled, Jennifer picked up the book without thinking and slammed it down on Walter's arm with as much force as she could muster. With a surprised cry, he dropped her bleeding finger.

"You hit me!" he cried out, looking frightened and indignant all at once. "You hit me!" he repeated.

Then it hit her. "THE WINDOW!" Jennifer shouted, hoping to startle Walter into taking a step back. He did, and with adrenaline surging throughout her body, Jennifer launched herself at one of the cardboard windows. Her fingers scrabbled on the wet cardboard, taking out huge chunks at a time. There was no glass beneath the cardboard, and once Jennifer had torn enough cardboard away (she thought) she began to push her way out of the bloody room.

Walter, having recovered some sense in the mean time, had grabbed her feet and was pulling with all his might to bring her back in. Jennifer kicked and twisted, feeling her shoes come off in his grasp. Having lost his leverage, Walter fell back and Jennifer shot out the window. As the ground rushed up to meet her, Jennifer could hear a child wailing. She wondered if it was Walter…

Someone was hitting her face. She hated it when people hit her face. "I'm alive, I'm alive!" Jennifer protested, eyes fluttering open to gloom and shadows. She frowned, and sat up. Looking around didn't do any good; the room was so dim she could barely see past her nose. "Hello? Is someone here?" she asked, rising slowly from the ground. Her joints ached and cracked loudly in the stillness—of course, belly-flopping onto pavement should have some kind of impact on a body, even in Silent Hill.

"Don't move; there's broken glass on the floor." A male voice warned.

"Who are you?" Jennifer asked, getting to her feet in a hurry and taking a wary step back. Glass snapped under her foot, and she jumped back to the space her body had been occupying. The sound hadn't been followed by the tell-tale sting that meant she'd cut her feet…but hadn't she just lost her shoes to Walter and his apartment? Isn't that what had _just_ happened! "What's going on here?" she repeated for what had to be the millionth time that day.

"My name is Leon Kennedy; I'm an officer with the local police department." The man replied soothingly.

"Get out of the shadows." Jennifer ordered. "And your weapon had better be holstered!" she added.

"Calm down; there's nothing here to hurt you now." He said; a small beam of light blinded Jennifer for a moment. She ducked away from it, eyes unseeing. "Sorry about that." He said as a hand wrapped itself gingerly around Jennifer's wrist. When she tried to pull away, the man spoke again. "Please be careful; there's glass anywhere…I don't know how you got in here without cutting yourself." He said as he pulled her out of what was slowly emerging as a boiler room in her eyes.

Safely out in the hall, the stranger turned off his flashlight. "The batteries are trying to die." He explained, wincing at his choice of words. "Now…are you all right miss?" the officer asked, again touching her very gently as he turned her from side to side.

Jennifer shook her head. "I'm not hurt, if that's what you mean." She said. "But I'm about as far from all right as you can get in this place; where are we anyway?"

Officer Kennedy frowned. There was more light in the hallway, and she could see his face more clearly. He was young—probably a rookie if he was anything—with wide blue eyes and brown hair that fell over his forehead and into his eyes. His face was long, but not frighteningly so; it was in proportion with the rest of him as he loomed over Jennifer. "We're at the elementary school…question is, how did you get here?" he asked.

Jennifer blew a long and dramatic sigh. "You wouldn't believe me if I told you." She warned.

"You seem shaken; let's go into an empty classroom and sit down." Officer Kennedy tried to take the golf club from her. She hadn't even realized she'd been holding it.

"No way man; I am not walking around this demented hell hole unarmed." Jennifer warned. She pulled away from him.

Kennedy sighed. "Miss, please don't be hysterical—"

"I am NOT hysterical. If I were hysterical, I'd be screaming. What I am, at the moment, is crazy." She replied sharply.

The cop held his hands up. "Look, I didn't mean anything by it, okay?" he said, his voice strained. "It's just…" He couldn't seem to be able to finish the sentence; his words were lost in an exasperated sigh.

"It's just that something's going on here that they don't teach you about at the academy, right?" Jennifer said sarcastically. Her tone softened immediately when she saw the young man's anguished face. "Get me out of this basement and I'll tell you what's happened to me. Then you can tell me what happened to you. Is that all right with you Officer Kennedy?" she put a hand on his arm.

He nodded. "Call me Leon." He replied, taking her hand and pulling her through the darkness surrounding the boilers. Glass crunched under their steps until they stood before the only door in the room; Jennifer was glad she had worn sneakers that day…gladder still that she hadn't _really_ lost them earlier.

As Leon pulled the door open for her, Jennifer looked back over her shoulder. The windows were blacked out, but the room was barely lit with what she would have called 'stupid cheesy horror-movie ambiance lighting'…if this were a movie. She could just make out the looming shape of the boilers; no flames flickered within their cast-iron bellies. For a second she thought she saw something move in the shadows; the thought was gone before she really even finished it. Numb, she focused on the dark, empty staircase ahead. Leon was close to her back; she hoped he had a gun…

The first floor was blissfully empty, cool and smelling faintly of stale air and old papers. She started for the front doors, but Leon pulled her back. They were locked, he'd explained, though how he wasn't sure. She'd made the mistake of wishing aloud for her ax back; he'd stared at her like she was insane.

"What do you mean 'your ax'? You're not going to tell me you gave up a perfectly good ax for a piece-of-crap 9-iron." He said, staring at her, amazed and disbelieving.

Jennifer put her hands on her hips. "In case you didn't notice hun, I ain't exactly stacked like Arnold." She replied sourly. "The ax was heavy and it slowed me way the hell down; so yes I gave up a perfectly good ax for this piece-of-crap 9-iron because I put stock in my feet over my ability to swing an ax." The thought of swinging an ax again made her queasy…she could still see the cloven head of the cross-dresser if she wasn't careful when she shut her eyes.

"Okay, okay!" Leon said, shaking his head. "Good points, all of them…but _man_ I wish you hadn't done that." He groaned.

Jennifer ignored him. She brushed past him, and pushed her way into the nurse's office. The classrooms were on the second floor, she remembered, and she was too tired and too frightened to climb the next flight of stairs to see what monsters were waiting for her up there.

"Hey…wait up!" Leon protested, grabbing her arm. "You'll get yourself killed if throw yourself into these rooms without clearing them." He said with wide eyes and a strained voice.

His fear was palpable, riding the stale air in bitter electric currents that made Jennifer dizzy and shaky. "Personal knowledge or common sense?" she asked, unable to help herself.

Leon's lips tightened, and he said nothing.

"Sorry…" Jennifer mumbled.

Leon went in first; to Jennifer's relief, he _did_ have a gun. She stood in the doorway while he poked into every dark corner and under the gurney and the desk and chair. She didn't see anything personally, didn't…didn't _sense_ anything or anyone. But she waited in the doorway for Leon to give her the all-clear sign. She owed him that much, didn't she?

Jennifer boosted herself onto the gurney-bed, crossing her legs Indian-style on the paper cover. There was too much darkness underneath the bed to leave her feet dangling free. Leon tried the light switch by the door with no luck; he made a strangled noise of disgust and flopped into the chair next to the desk. Without any real hope on his face, he tried the lamp.

It flickered once, twice; then flared to life only to dim almost to the point where it did no good. Still, it alleviated some of the creepy, untraceable ambiance lighting.

"So how did you get here?" Leon asked, leaning back in the chair. He didn't relinquish his hold on his gun; he gripped the butt tightly, though thankfully enough he kept his fingers away from the trigger.

Jennifer blew a deep sigh through her lips, the cold air ruffling her bangs and tossing them across one eye. "Honestly? I leapt from what had to be a third-story window in an apartment building that I'm not sure actually existed." She confessed.

Leon didn't bat an eyelash. "I crashed my car into a ditch and woke parked in the parking lot. Then I got chased in here by these…_things_." His eyes lost their focus for a second. Jennifer left him a minute to regain his composure. He seemed grateful for it. "My partner…he didn't…we…" he shook his head. "We opened the front door. We walked _in_." he said firmly, as though she had disagreed with him.

Jennifer hadn't said a word. She supposed it was his own mind arguing with him, telling him that the things he was going to say hadn't happened. She knew that feeling; she'd let him wrestle with it and she wouldn't say anything different.

"But we shut the door, and we were on the third floor…" Leon rubbed the back of his neck with his free hand. "There were…things…little…demon-things. They had pieces of scrap metal…they kept trying to cut us…and the walls…" he shuddered. "There were bodies on the walls. Pieces and whole ones…and blood…I've never seen that much blood before…" he said weakly.

"I know." Jennifer said dryly with a faint nod.

"We heard sirens off in the distance…Chris—Chris is…was…he started shooting the things, trying to get a path. He was screaming about back-up." Leon's eyes came back into focus then, and they blazed furiously in the dim light. "One of the little bastards came in behind him and got him right in the back of the knee. He went down hard; they were all over him. I don't know what happened next…I…I remember they started swarming me too, but I can't remember if it hurt. I just remember falling down. Then I woke up in this weird-ass hospital room." He said.

"Weird-ass hospital room?" Jennifer asked suspiciously. "Was it old? And bloody?"

Leon nodded. "Yeah, how did you—" he started.

Jennifer interrupted him. "And you were on this nasty-ass bed, right?"

He nodded.

"And there was a picture on the monitor next to the bed; of some girl?"

"The name on the bottom said Alessa." He offered. "How did you…?"

Jennifer shook her head. "I woke up in there…after…" she tried and failed on her first attempt to get the words out.

"Start from the beginning." Leon prodded gently. He smiled softly, though his eyes were still wide with fear.

"I thought you were telling yours first." Jennifer replied.

"There's not much after that…I woke up in that nasty place and I ran for the door…I could hear a kid crying, so I threw open the door to try and find them. Then I was in the boiler room; where I found you in the middle of all that glass." He finished.

Jennifer rubbed her face; the 9-iron rested on the bed beside her hip. "I've been tripping all day." She said at last.

"Tripping?" Leon said, cocking his head and staring at her curiously.

"I guess that's what you'd call it. I _was_ in my car, I'm pretty sure…I was driving into town, through the woods, when something hit my windshield. I went off the road; then I woke up, and I was still in my car, but I was sitting in the driveway of my house." The words came faster and faster still; she didn't want to relive all the memories so far. "Then I went up the stairs to go in, and I swear I went through the door but then I was back in my car and I was still in the woods."

"What?" Leon shook his head, unable to follow.

"I know, it's confusing. But that's what happened…then I was hauling ass through the woods because my car fucking blew up…" Jennifer growled. "Two payments to go and the thing is now a series of flaming bits."

"Tough luck." He commiserated.

"I wound up at this place called 'Wish House', and—"

Leon got to his feet. "You didn't go in, did you?"

"Well…yeah…I mean, I was looking for help. What's wrong?"

"The 'Wish House' shouldn't have been there…some guy named Henry or Harry or something burned it down; it used to be owned by this cult…they used kids for their ceremonies…it's some pretty dark history." Leon said softly, turning his face away from Jennifer. Bile had risen in his throat, and he needed a minute to clear it. He'd made the mistake of reading the reports on 'Wish House'. He wished he hadn't.

"Well it was there. I went _in_ it." Jennifer said firmly. "And I met this kid, and it was crazy because he looks and he sounds just like this boy I went to school with. But the kid _I_ went to school with is dead, so that's impossible." She added sharply, more for herself than for Leon's sake.

Leon sat on the edge of the bed, laying his gun next to her golf club. He put a hand on her shoulder. "Can you really say that?" he asked.

"Not anymore…" she admitted. "But then the kid, who says his name is Billy, just like the kid I used to know, started telling me all this weird-ass shit! And then this big-ass cross-dresser comes in and Billy practically throws me in a closet and I wind up going down these stairs and into this cell…then that psycho's right on me and I passed out."

"And then you wake up somewhere new." Leon finished.

"Right; back in my driveway. Then some more crazy shit happens, and I get eaten by shadows."

"Eaten by what?" Leon sounded genuinely surprised.

"I can't describe it…I was in the attic, and the lights went out and came back on. But the shadows didn't go away. They got thicker, and I could feel them pulling at me…and then I fell."

"And you woke up…"

"In the same hospital room you did." Jennifer said promptly. "Then more crazy shit—"

"That you're reluctant to tell me about." Leon interrupted.

Jennifer licked her lips, and ran her hands over her face again. "I thought I killed someone…I thought I saw someone else die…but I don't know if anything I've seen or felt is real anymore." She said in a hushed whisper.

Leon looked down at his lap. "I know." He replied softly. "I know." He repeated.

"Anyone, I wound up going through this door that was drawn on paper, and I wound up in this closet in this apartment owned by some psycho that's calling himself Walter Sullivan."

Leon's head snapped up. "No." he said firmly. "That is…"

"Don't even say it, because nothing's that anymore." Jennifer replied. "Anyways, he tried to grab me, so I opened the book—"

"What book?" Leon demanded.

Jennifer shrugged the backpack off her shoulders, and pulled it onto her lap. She pulled out the book Doulgas had given her. "That kid—Billy—he said all the answers were in here."

"So you got it out while he was trying to grab you?"

"No; he hadn't grabbed me yet. He was just being creepy and psycho…"

"Okay."

"So I open the book, and I wound up cutting myself on the edge. Then this passage from 'Jack and the Beanstalk' appears and then Walter went ape-shit on me." The book remained closed in her lap. She couldn't bear to open it again.

"So you…what? Climbed down a beanstalk?" Leon couldn't follow the story; hers had even more holes in it than his; no wonder she had called it 'tripping'.

"No; I leapt head first out of the third story window, like I told you earlier. Then I was in the basement, and that's about the time you showed up." Jennifer finished.

Leon shook his head, staring blankly at the wall ahead of him. "Tripping is a good word for whatever this is…"

"It's like…it's like the reality we're used to has…it's either turned into a Pink Floyd video or water; I haven't decided which." Jennifer said.

Leon nodded. "So what do we do?" he asked.

"I don't know; you're the cop, you tell me."

"If I knew what the fuck to do, do you think my ass would be sitting here on this bed with you?" he demanded dryly.

"Touché." Jennifer replied. "The front doors are locked, you said, so we have to find another way out. Hopefully one that doesn't involve jumping off the roof." She added.

"You think the answer might be in that book?" Leon asked hopefully.

"I don't think so…this hasn't really become a puzzle yet…I mean…not that anything else was but…"

"I know what you mean; we haven't come to the last resort yet." He finished.

"Right…so, back to the question: what do we do?"

"We'll have to go exploring." Leon said grimly.

"Better stock up on band-aids before we hit the third floor." Jennifer said, perfectly serious.

Leon's face blanched.

"Sorry…my mouth can't seem to stop." She said sheepishly.

"It's okay." Leon replied stiffly. "You've been through a lot." He added.

Jennifer sighed again. "When I was in the apartment…I got a phone call…"

"From Billy?" Leon guessed. "I mean, since everything's gone haywire and all…" he added, the words feeling inadequate.

She nodded. "He said…he told me I was in a bad place, and to come to school because it wasn't as bad a place as where I was. He said he and Miriam were here."

"Then…we should find them, I guess." Leon made to get off the bed.

"Where do we start? I mean…if they really are who they say they are, they're dead." Jennifer protested, grabbing his arm before he could move away.

"Walter Sullivan's supposed to be dead too; but I have no doubt that the guy in the apartment who said he was Walter really was. I don't doubt it for a minute." Leon said firmly as he slid off the bed. He held his hands out to Jennifer to help her off.

Jennifer grasped his hands tightly; they were warm. "I wish I knew why we had to be here." She whispered, getting to her feet.

Leon squeezed her hands. "We'll get out of this. I'll get you out of this somehow…I promise." He added softly.

Jennifer smiled weakly. "Okay. Let's do it then." She said, hoping to sound resolute. She turned back to grab the golf club…but it wasn't there! Panic re-tightened its grip on her mind. "Leon? Your gun and my golf-club were on the bed, right?" she asked shrilly.

"What!" Leon pushed her aside and tore the paper off the bed, punching the poorly upholstered mattress and cursing soundly. "They're not here. How can they not be here!" he demanded, turning back to her.

Jennifer shook her head. "Whoever's in charge seems to think we don't need them." She said softly.

"There can't be anyone in charge; this is too crazy for anyone to be in charge!" Leon replied sharply.

"Come and get them…" a sweet, girlish voice called from behind them.

Jennifer and Leon both turned to face the doorway; Jennifer screamed.

There in the doorway, was little Miriam. She was wearing her favorite pink gingham sundress, and she had the golf club in her hand and the gun in the pocket of her dress. Her hair was in pigtails, and she was smiling up at them.

She only had one eye…

Then she was gone.

"Damn it! Damn it, damn it, damn it!" Leon bellowed, storming out of the nurses' office and standing in the middle of the hall. "Where the fuck did she go?" he screamed.

Jennifer shoved the book back in her backpack, and slid her arms into the straps. She rushed out of the office. "Probably to the place we'd be the smartest to be afraid of." She said grimly. "That's how it's been working so far." She added.

Leon punched a wall, near tears. "We can't go up there unarmed. Those things…" he said pitifully.

Jennifer patted his back. "To get our stuff back, we're going to have to. We'll find something; we'll make do. You promised me you'd get me out of this, remember? I'm holding you to that." She said softly.

Leon looked back at her slowly, his face blank and unreadable. "A promise is a promise." He said gruffly.

"C'mon…maybe we can find something along the way." Jennifer prodded.

Leon nodded. "Right…the stairs are at the end of the hall." He pulled away from the wall, took her hand, and led her up the hall.

Jennifer followed quietly and amiably. She couldn't say anything else, because the words on the tip of her tongue weren't morale boosters. Leon didn't need her doubt; he had enough of his own…still…

They were _so_ fucked…


End file.
